Support

What you are looking at

Two enormous white hands break the surface of the Grand Canal and press against the façade of a Venetian palazzo. The left hand is spread flat against the pink plaster beside a Gothic window; the right hand pushes its fingertips up under a balcony. Their forearms disappear into the water, so whoever they belong to is submerged. The scale is the point: each hand is taller than the windows it reaches past.

The sculpture is Support by Lorenzo Quinn, an Italian artist born in Rome in 1966 and based in Spain. It was installed in May 2017 on the canal front of the Ca' Sagredo Hotel, a fifteenth-century palace near the Rialto, during the Venice Biennale. It was a temporary work and has since been removed.

How it was made

Although the hands look like carved marble, they were made from resin over an internal metal structure, finished in white so they read as stone from the water. Quinn modeled them on the hands of his own son, Lawrence. Fabricating a sculpture of this size was only half the job; it then had to be anchored in the soft bed of the canal and fixed to a listed historic building without damaging it.

What does Support mean?

Quinn said the work was about climate change. Venice is sinking slowly into its lagoon while the sea rises, and floods, the acqua alta, have become more frequent and more severe. The hands can be read two ways, and the ambiguity is deliberate. Are they holding the building up, or pushing it over? Quinn presented them as a reminder that human hands have the power to destroy a place like Venice and also the power to save it. The use of a child's hands adds a further layer: it is the next generation that will inherit the problem.

The image went around the world, and the November 2019 floods, the worst in Venice for more than fifty years, gave it a grim afterlife.

Reception and legacy

Some critics found Support too literal, a ready-made photograph rather than a sculpture. But it did what public art rarely manages, reaching millions of people who never set foot in the Biennale. Quinn returned to the hand motif at the 2019 Biennale with Building Bridges, six pairs of arched hands at the Arsenale.

Where to see it

Support is no longer in Venice. For more of Quinn's work, see his artist page and our guide to famous sculptures.