In Luncheon on the Grass, Mona von Wittlage revisits Manet’s scandalous icon of modernity, reimagining it through the fragile, perishable medium of blood. The figures recline and sit in quiet conversation, their bodies and garments traced in alternating lines of graphite and blood. What was once a provocation in 19th-century Paris becomes here a meditation on intimacy, temporality, and the persistence of desire.

The dialogue between clothed and unclothed, presence and absence, permanence and decay, unfolds on a white expanse of paper that suggests both emptiness and possibility. The use of blood transforms leisure into vulnerability, reminding us that beneath every gesture of pleasure lies the inescapable awareness of mortality.

Luncheon on the Grass thus becomes less a quotation than a transformation: a contemporary scene in which the echo of Manet lingers, but the pulse is unmistakably human, fragile, and transient.