A Swiss man with a tattoo of the Virgin Mary on his back, which was sold to a German art collector, will go on show for the first time next week at Shanghai’s SHContemporary fair, said Wim Delvoye, the Belgian artist who created the work.

The tattoo on Tim Steiner, 32, took 35 hours to create and was sold last week by Jutta Nexdorf’s gallery in Zurich for 150,000 euros ($214,320). The unidentified buyer has the right to sell Steiner’s tattoo or remove it upon the bearer’s death, Delvoye said.

“He will be the highlight of the fair,” Delvoye said in a phone interview yesterday from Belgium. “We’ve created a unique piece of art and a unique transaction and the world can see it for the first time” at Xin Beijing Gallery’s booth, he said. (…)

Delvoye is no stranger to controversy. His 2001 “Euterpe” resembles from a distance a cathedral window pane composed of tinted glass. The 2-meter work is actually a collage of 36 X-ray pictures, each the photograph of a Delvoye friend having sexual intercourse after being painted in radio-contrast barium sulfate.

His 2001 Cloaca machine replicated the human digestive system, producing rinds of feces that sold for 3,000 euros each in vacuum-packed bags. His plan to exhibit eight live pigs, each tattooed with the Walt Disney Co.’s characters and the Louis Vuitton motif, was rejected by SHContemporary’s organizer.

{ Bloomberg | Continue reading | more Wim Delvoye’s tattos | Delvoye attooing a pig }

photo { “The whole point to the blank banner is that my friends can write different things inside.” | Cafe con Lesley }

READ MORE >> visual design, economics, tattoo | October 3rd, 2008