Zeus without Europa

A bronze bull with gilded horns and muzzle turns on a block of white marble — its back empty.

In the myth, Zeus takes the form of a bull and carries Europa across the sea. Here the bull remains and the abduction does not. The top face of the marble is smooth, the lower half chiselled into vertical grooves.

The work draws on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the classical myth of the abduction of Europa, but what matters here is an absence: there is no Europa. Zeus stands alone, caught in the shape of a powerful bull, on a roughly hewn stone capital. His polished, gold-reflecting horns recall Ovid’s description, yet without Europa his raw strength loses both its object and its meaning. The sculpture reads as a double metaphor: a geopolitical reflection on a continent searching for its soul, and an existential question about the emptiness left when tradition no longer reaches the present.