Woman with Halo and Sceptre

Joe Zucker is a radically inventive painter whose mature works are built, constructed, or made in emphatically material and physical terms. His most iconic and influential pieces were created by attaching cotton balls, dipped in paint and Rhoplex (a polymer used in caulks and sealants), onto cotton duck canvas. This tedious, labor-intensive process, which the artist originated, relies on the tactile, dotlike forms of the cotton balls to compose a pictorial field. Woman with Halo and Sceptre is part of a series of five paintings, each comprising the same number of cotton balls, that use images of the San Vitale Byzantine mosaics (526–48) in Ravenna, Italy, as their source material—in effect, creating a mosaic out of a mosaic.