In The Hairdryer, Mona von Wittlage reinterprets Jacques-Louis David’s revolutionary martyrdom for a contemporary age. The scene of political sacrifice is transposed into the intimate space of a tiled bathroom, where a young woman reclines in a bathtub, head tilted back, hair flowing like a crimson cascade. In her hand she holds not a quill but a hairdryer—an object of modern ritual and potential danger.

The body, traced in blood, hovers between sensuality and death, its languor unsettling in its beauty. Where David painted propaganda, von Wittlage stages fragility: the banal object becomes a symbol of risk, of mortality hidden within the everyday.

The Hairdryer is both homage and subversion, a meditation on how images of power, sacrifice, and vulnerability are reimagined in the private spaces of contemporary life.