Marco Evaristti

Biography

On 24 March 2004, in the Kangia fjord near Ilulissat in Greenland, Marco Evaristti, with a crew of twenty on two icebreakers, used three fire hoses to pour some three thousand litres of blood-red paint over the tip of a small iceberg. His explanation was brief: nature belongs to everyone, and everyone wants to decorate it. The work was called the Ice Cube Project.

He is an architect, and he still builds.

Evaristti was born in 1963 in Santiago, Chile, and has lived in Denmark since the 1980s. He took his master’s degree in architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied under Henning Larsen, and has since run both private architectural projects and large commissions, combining Scandinavian, Asian and Latin American approaches. In 1995 he was a visiting professor at Silpakorn University of Fine Arts in Bangkok. More than thirty people died on the roads there every day; Evaristti went out with investigators to accidents, collected blood and other materials, and painted with them, together with ink, on canvases. He called the series “Crash” and cited Picasso’s words about art as a lie that conveys the truth: the blood on these canvases, he said, was no lie.

He won notoriety with “Helena” (2000) at the Trapholt art museum in Kolding: ten working blenders with water and live fish, which visitors could switch on. Eight fish died, the police ordered the blenders to be disconnected, the museum director Peter Meyer was charged with cruelty to animals and acquitted, and the court found the police order groundless. The manufacturer of the blenders publicly distanced itself from the installation. When “Helena” was shown again in 2006, Evaristti had to answer under animal-protection law, this time in Austria.

He gathers most of his actions under the name Pink State: in his words, his own state and state of mind, with a passport and a constitution but no government and no guarded borders, which from time to time materialises in short-lived works in the landscape. The iceberg was one of them. On 6 June 2007 he was detained for trying to paint the summit of Mont Blanc red, and on 8 June he covered it with red fabric and planted a pole with the Pink State flag, explaining that he wanted to draw attention to the destruction of nature. In 2008 came Arido Rosso in the Sahara, and in March 2013 a frozen waterfall at Hovden in Norway, coloured with fruit juice. The themes of these pieces, as he puts it, are power over territory and brotherhood. Behind them also lies the material, which he chooses deliberately to provoke a psychological response in the viewer: diamonds, gold, semen, blood. Many of the works are known mainly from second-hand accounts, and the details are hard to check.

On 13 January 2007 he gave a dinner whose main course was agnolotti topped with a meatball made from his own fat, removed by liposuction.

Another line of his work concerns death and religion. “Terrorialista” (2001) is a bronze sculpture with a silver patina in twenty-eight parts that together make up a whole human body; each part is based on photographs of people blown apart by acts of terror on both sides of one conflict, and neither sex nor faith nor nationality can be told in them any longer. In 2009 he showed “Body Bags”: three bronze body bags in three colours, one for each of the main monotheistic religions, a modern counterpart of the skull as a reminder of death. In 2010 came punching bags stuffed, instead of sand, with hair from Christians, Jews and Muslims, and “Rolexgate”, a model of the gate of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, eight-tenths of it made of gold from the teeth of Jews killed in the camps. The model was briefly shown in Berlin and removed because of the public’s reaction, and the Jewish Museum in Copenhagen declined to exhibit it.

In 2015 he took part in the Aquamediale festival in Lübben with the multimedia installation “Brotherhood”, and in November 2022 he opened his first solo exhibition in Thailand at the same time as a show in Copenhagen. In March 2025, at his exhibition “And Now You Care” in Copenhagen, three piglets were meant to starve to death, as a reminder of the twenty-five thousand piglets that die every day in the Danish meat industry. Animal-welfare groups protested, and in early March activists, with the help of a friend of the artist, took the piglets away. Evaristti was upset at first, but later said that this way the piglets would at least have a happy life.