Let us not forget the lessons of the past, humor is your friend through time.





Downey said he learned about the theft while preparing a new project in Germany and said he was “a bit sad that it’s gone”.

“My feeling is that it has something to do with the new election [of Donald Trump], but who knows, right?” Downey told AFP.

He added that when the original statue had been set on fire “it didn’t feel right” so he had decided to replace it with a bronze copy, which he has described as an “anti-monument, anti-propaganda”.




[In 2020] A wooden sculpture of first lady Melania Trump near her home town of Sevnica, Slovenia, has been removed after being set on fire during the US independence day weekend, according to the artist who commissioned the sculpture.

Brad Downey, a Berlin-based American artist, said he had the life-size sculpture – now blackened and disfigured – removed as soon as police informed him on 5 July, a year after it was unveiled.

“I want to know why they did it,” said Downey, who had hoped the statue would foster a dialogue about the political situation in the United States, highlighting Melania Trump’s status as an immigrant married to a president sworn to reduce immigration.

Downey also defended himself against accusations that he sanctioned the burning of the wooden statue as part of his artistic process. “I neither set fire to the statue, nor did I commission anyone to do so.”

The charred and blistered remains of the wooden artwork by Zupevc, which was unveiled in July 2019, went on show at an art gallery in the Slovenian beach resort of Koper earlier this month.

Called Fuck Off Illusion, the exhibition also presented the mould for the latest bronze version.

The curator, Karlo Hmeljak, said the exhibition presented “all the incarnations of this contradiction that is called Melania” and said “it’s not the final word of what Melania will become in the future”, in what art critics took to be a strong hint that further artistic interpretations may be planned.

The wooden sculpture was torched on 4 July, which is Independence Day in the US. Police are reportedly yet to find the perpetrators.

Zupevc said he and Melania Trump were born in the same hospital and he had been inspired to carve the sculpture from the remains of a linden tree.

Zupevc said in a documentary film by Downey on the making of the statue: “I plugged in my angle grinder … I worked and made mistakes … finished the hair … the eyes and all. Then I called my brother, who said: ‘Spitting image of our waitress.’ And so it was,” he said, referring to Trump’s former waiting job before she emigrated to the US.

The resulting statue, which Zupevc created with a chainsaw and sanded with a power tool, carving around a life-size photo template of the waving first lady at her husband’s inauguration, had been described as rustic and naive with expressionist facial features.