Over 1,700 nude men and women painted in red and gold body paint, created an interpretation of a scene from the Richard Wagner opera “Der Ring des Nibelungen” on Saturday (June 23) in Max-Joseph Platz, Munich, Germany, outside the opera house.
It was all part of a body art installation organised by the American photographer Spencer Tunick. The photographer was invited to create the art installation by the Bavarian State Opera to mark the opening of the 2012 Munich summer opera season. His installations incorporate dozens, hundreds or thousands of volunteers; and his photographs are a documented record of these events.
“The individuals en masse, without their clothing, grouped together metamorphose into a new shape. The bodies extend into and upon the landscape, like a substance,” it adds. “These grouped masses, which do no underscore sexuality, become abstractions that challenge or reconfigure one’s views of nudity and privacy;” he stated.
Spencer Tunick was born in the US in Orange County, New York in January 1, 1967. He is an is an American artist best known for his installations that feature large numbers of nude people posed in artistic formations. These installations are often situated in urban locations throughout the world, although he has also done some “Beyond The City” woodland and beach installations and still does individuals and small groups occasionally. Tunick is the subject of three HBO documentaries, Naked States,[1] Naked World,[2] and Positively Naked.[3] His models are unpaid volunteers who receive a limited edition photo as compensation. In 1986, he visited London, where he took photographs of a nude at a bus stop and of scores of nudes in Alleyn’s School’s Lower School Hall in Dulwich, Southwark. He earned a Bachelor of Arts from Emerson College in 1988. In 1992, Tunick began documenting live nudes in public locations in New York through video and photographs. His early works from this period focus more on a single nude individual or on small groups of nudes. These works are much more intimate images than the massive installations for which he is now known. By 1994 Tunick had organized and photographed over 65 temporary site related installations in the United States and abroad. Since then, he has taken his celebration of the nude form internationally, and has taken photos in cities that include Byron Bay, Cork, Dublin, Bruges, Buenos Aires, Buffalo, Lisbon, London, Lyon, Melbourne, Montreal, Rome, San Sebastián, São Paulo, Caracas, Newcastle/Gateshead, Vienna, Düsseldorf, Helsinki, Santiago, Mexico City, Sydney and Amsterdam. In August 1997, Tunick also photographed a large group of nudes at The Great Went, a festival hosted by American rock band Phish in Maine.