Emilio Isgrò — Where is Saint Tropez (2024)

Emilio Isgrò (b. 1937) stands among the defining voices of Italian and international conceptual art. Poet, writer, and visual artist, he fundamentally altered postwar visual culture through his signature “cancellature” (erasures): a gesture developed in the 1960s that turns written language into image, thought, and critique, and that continues to shape his inquiry into memory, identity, and the reliability of signs.

Where is Saint Tropez (2024) translates this iconic act into a fully three-dimensional, museum-grade object: a political globe presenting the Western Hemisphere, mounted on a refined black base and partially crossed by dense black strokes that obscure place names and borders. Isgrò does not erase the world; he subjects it to doubt. The intervention is at once poetic, ironic, and analytical—an invitation to reconsider what we accept as fixed coordinates, and what is lost when geography becomes unstable, mediated, or culturally interchangeable. The seemingly light question of the title opens into a deeper ambiguity, positioning Saint-Tropez—synonym of leisure, myth, and projection—as a vanishing point within the contemporary map of belonging.

As part of Isgrò’s recent sculptural output, this unique work embodies a sought-after evolution of his practice, where erasure becomes spatial and experiential rather than purely textual. With Isgrò’s presence firmly established across major institutional collections—including Centre Pompidou, the Uffizi, MART Rovereto, GAM Torino, and Rome’s Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna—and a market that has seen comparable sculptural and text-based works achieve results in the €90,000–€120,000 range in recent years, this piece offers a compelling intersection of recognisable authorship, contemporary relevance, and collection-driven rarity.