Simon Fujiwara Recasts Picasso’s “Guernica” With Drones, Aftermath, and a Cartoon Bear at Mudam Luxembourg
A new, room-filling painting at Mudam Luxembourg (Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean) greets visitors with a familiar composition and an unfamiliar cast: UK artist Simon Fujiwara has reworked Pablo Picasso’s anti-war masterpiece “Guernica” (1937) through his own cartoon surrogate, Who the Baer, and the visual language of contemporary conflict.
The painting is a centerpiece of “A Whole New World,” a survey spanning two decades of Fujiwara’s practice, on view March 20 through August 23 at the Luxembourg museum, widely regarded as one of Europe’s leading contemporary art institutions. In Fujiwara’s version, Who the Baer is submerged in a dense tangle of bodies, bombs, and drones, a collision of the historical icon and the present tense.
Fujiwara has described the work as “Guernica after the battle.” The figures, he says, are no longer locked in struggle but collapsed into “a giant pile,” drained by what has happened. Behind them, a sunrise suggests a new day that is not necessarily a resolution. The title, “A Whole New World (for Who?),” turns the image into a question about aftermath: when wars end or shift shape, who is admitted into the next order, and who is left behind.
The “Guernica” interpretation is the third work in Fujiwara’s ongoing series featuring Who the Baer, a character he has used as a conceptual filter for a culture saturated with references. Fujiwara has framed the figure as a way to think past a lineage of appropriation and hyper-referentiality associated with artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and Elaine Sturtevant. The bear’s “lovable” surface, in his telling, mirrors the way contemporary audiences are trained to consume complex ideas through disarming packaging.
At Mudam, that logic extends to the exhibition’s architecture. Fujiwara has organized the show as a theme park, dividing the museum into distinct “lands” that connect what he calls the massive themes of the present. The result is a deliberately distorted Disneyland of adult subject matter: porn, disease, and pandemics recur as motifs, not for shock value alone but as a way to examine how bodies and images circulate, and how identity is assembled under pressure.
One of the most direct sections, “Syphilis: A Conquest” (2020–23), draws on Fujiwara’s experience of contracting syphilis, a disease that remains culturally taboo despite its long history. Rather than treating it as a secret, Fujiwara has spoken of wanting to approach it as a kind of exuberant disclosure, shaped by the “fever dreams” of recovery. The installation includes four busts of Francisco de Goya, Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, Vincent Van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin — historical figures he refers to as his “syphilitic comrades,” positioning illness as an uneasy form of lineage.
Other key works pivot from biography to public scandal and collective memory. “Joanne” (2016–18), a mixed-media piece, centers on Joanne Salley, a former Miss Northern Ireland, artist, and TV presenter who taught Fujiwara at Harrow School in Middlesex, London, in 2000. Salley became the subject of headlines in 2011 after pupils circulated private topless photographs of her that had been taken by a female photography teacher and left on a memory stick in a school studio. Fujiwara has described Salley as an “inspirational figure,” and the work revisits the episode as a study in exposure, power, and the afterlife of images.
In “Likeness” (2018), Fujiwara turns to a wax figure of Anne Frank, aiming, as he has put it, to demythologize the young Jewish diarist murdered by the Nazis. The choice of wax — a material associated with spectacle, tourism, and uneasy realism — sharpens the work’s question about how historical figures are turned into consumable icons.
The exhibition’s final section, “The Way” (2015–26), is dedicated to Japanese gay porn star Koh Masaki (1984–2013), who died at 29. Fujiwara has described encountering an image of Masaki’s boyfriend feeding him in a hospital bed, an intimacy that, for the artist, cut through the distancing effects of pornography. The installation includes a sequence of images that capture Masaki’s final ejaculation on film, a detail that underscores the show’s insistence on looking at the body not only as an object of desire but also as a site of vulnerability and care.
Across its “lands,” “A Whole New World” returns to a central prompt articulated in a press statement: “How should one construct a self today?” Fujiwara’s answer is not a single narrative but a set of collisions — between high modernist icons and drone warfare, between private illness and public history, between pornographic consumption and human tenderness — staged with the seductive clarity of a theme park and the lingering discomfort of what it asks viewers to carry out with them.
