A wooden sculpture of first lady Melania Trump — just miles from her hometown of Sevnica, Slovenia — was set on fire on July 4.
Brad Downey, a Berlin-based American artist, told Reuters he had the life-sized blackened, disfigured sculpture removed as soon as police informed him on July 5th of the incident,” the news agency reported.
“I want to know why they did it,” Downey said.
The Washington Post, predictably, did not like the sculpture.
“Rising nine feet from the trunk, the statue is blocky, waving with a hand more akin to a paw. Its eyes are bulging ovals beneath a near unibrow, its nose a pudgy blob. Save for its powder-blue Inauguration Day garb, it looks little like the first lady,” The liberal newspaper wrote in July 2019.
The sculpture was carved with a chain saw into a living linden tree, giving it a distinctive look, by pipe layer and amateur woodworker Ales Zupevc.
“The roots of the tree are still in the ground. There’s something rough about it. But there’s something very rough about the first lady, too. To me it is a parody, but at the same time, it’s not. This guy put a lot of work into this,” Berlin-based curator Lukas Feireiss told The Post.
The burning of the first lady’s sculpture followed a pledge from President Trump to prosecute vandals attacking historical monuments and statues, as political activism against racial injustice has swept across the country.
“In January, a large wooden statue resembling Donald Trump, designed by a local artist last year, was burnt in Slovenia’s city of Moravce, east of the capital Ljubljana,” Reuters reported.
