The celebrated New York artist Ross Bleckner was Sebastian Errazuriz’s mentor and professor at the NYU Masters in Fine Arts program. From the first day of class they intellectually challenged each other, and have since remained good friends. Both of them regularly incorporate the awareness of life and death into their work; Ross Bleckner’s paintings have a tradition of depicting fallen angels, dimming lights, clocks, and funeral flowers dedicated to many of his friends who died of AIDS during the ‘80s.

For BODY OF WORK, Errazuriz challenged Bleckner to “stop hiding behind pictorial symbolisms” and address his own mortality. Bleckner accepted the challenge as long as the project was a collaboration. Errazuriz designed two identical coffee tables to resemble coffins in which life-sized photographs of each artist naked was placed, as if the artist had passed away, buried underneath their body of work. Bleckner added beautiful layers of paint onto each photograph. User is able to remove the paintings from the table, and choose which one to leave on top, which to hang on the wall.