Superman, 2024

Catherine Gran  

In Nécropole de Superman, Catherine Gran turns one of modern culture's most recognizable heroes into the subject of an absurd and poignant memorial. Rather than presenting the figure itself, she builds a precarious monument of stacked kitchen utensils, domestic objects, tangled matter, and discarded tools. The superhero survives only as absence, evoked through fragments and a handwritten epitaph.

Gran's precise ink technique gives extraordinary gravity to these ordinary materials. Through dense cross-hatching and refined tonal contrasts, pots, brushes, gloves, and utensils acquire the presence of relics. The familiar becomes theatrical, even ceremonial, as if the everyday world had inherited the remains of myth.

The work quietly overturns the logic of heroism. Strength, power, and invincibility are replaced by clutter, labor, and entropy. In this fragile vertical assemblage, Gran suggests that cultural icons do not vanish—they descend into objects, habits, and memories, where they continue to persist in altered form.