Berrocal Goliath

In the late 70s my dad & step-mom came back from a trip to Europe with a wonderful puzzle sculpture by Miguel Berrocal called “Mini Cristina”. A fist-sized chunk of nickel-plated brass on a short stand, it came apart into 23 pieces which took me most of an hour to reassemble. I loved the thing, and took it apart every time I visited them for many years.

As an adult I always wanted to own a Berrocal, but I was poor, and even when later I wasn’t I remained convinced that owning one would be too much of an extravagance. Finally in the spring of 2021 I realized this wasn’t true, and purchased an edition of Berrocal’s Goliath sculpture (go big or go home I guess).

The thing is magnificent, and a lot more impressive in person than I expected. Even though I knew the dimensions, I somehow had it in my head that it was about the size of a beer can. In fact it’s as big as a fifth of whiskey and weighs almost 25 pounds. It’s made up of 80 chunky pieces, including two different penis options (circumcised and non) and a fig-leaf. The first disassembly took 45 minutes, and twice as long to get it back together. I documented the process, though at the time I was concentrating on the sculpture, not the photography, so I blew the focus on a few of the shots. Eventually I’ll do a nice time-lapse video of the process.