Artist arrested for naked pose in front of Mona Lisa
An artist has been arrested after taking naked portraits of himself in front of the Mona Lisa painting in the Louvre art gallery in Paris.
Police were called to the scene this week after Spanish artist Adrián Pino Olivera posed naked - except for a black robe - in front of the Leonardo da Vinci artwork, known in French as La Joconde.
Olivera, who posed in broad daylight in a series of deliberately-provocative positions, was arrested and spent 24 hours in prison, and later banned for life from the Louvre.
He then posted the evidence on his Instagram account - on which he describes himself as a “performer” - as part of his wider project to take naked photos in front of famous artworks and monuments across Europe.
His other poses include shots in front of the famous Dejeuner Sur l’Herbe painting by Édouard Manet, which is hanging in the Musée d'Orsay; the David statue in the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence, Italy; in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin; by the Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen; and in the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, Spain.
Olivera also poses in a way that obviously hides his male genitalia, which, he says, is part of the project’s message to promote his idea of a matriarchal society, instead of the elements of the “masculine world I hate”.
He began the project in March 2017, and hopes to be finished by December this year, covering 22 exhibitions in total.
