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The Vienna-based artists’ collective Gelitin, notorious for its cheerfully anarchic irreverence, is committed to freedom and frankness, rarely shying away from any taboo subject and drawing its energy from a boundless childlike playfulness that refuses to be constrained by shame or social taboos. Comprising the four artists Wolfgang Gantner, Ali Janka, Florian Reither and Tobias Urban, Gelitin is known for its subversive, humorous approach to contemporary art.

In the more than 50 different plasticine versions of the Mona Lisa which the eccentric group has been creating since 2003 and which are among its key works, Gelitin engages with an icon of art history and with the concept of the artistic original and deglorifies it in a humorous and grotesque way. The world-famous “La Gioconda” by the Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci (created 1503 - 1506) is celebrated for the mysterious beauty and enigmatic expression of the portrait of Lisa Gherardini of Florence. Gelitin approaches this icon in the most light-hearted way imaginable by provocatively reinterpreting her in colourful plasticine: abstract, squashed, made of spaghetti sausages, with bulging goggle eyes or a grotesquely oversized potato nose.

At its first large solo exhibition in 2008 at the “Musée d'art Moderne” in Paris, several dozen versions were shown, some of which had already caused a stir at earlier exhibitions. In 2010, a selection of Mona Lisa renditions was again displayed as part of the project “One is too much and a hundred are not enough” at the Carlson Gallery in London.
 
(Ina Waldstein)