La Toupie, 2015
- Medium
- Cement
- Dimensions
- 59 1/2 × 30 3/8 × 16 1/2 in. (151.13 × 77.15 × 41.91 cm)
- Accession Number
- 2016.8A-B
- Credit
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Purchase with funds provided by the Acquisition and Collection Committee
La Toupie is a kind of chimera, initially appearing to be an amalgam of generic garden statuary: a bust of a long-haired girl, a central form that suggests an upside-down vase, a goose, and the lower half of a female figure carrying a grape-filled basket. To create this work, Moulène used a concrete mixer to revolve disparate cement sculptures against one another, forcing erosion and creating new planes of conjunction. Moulène rejects the label “sculpture” for works like La Toupie, instead referring to them as “objects.” The connotations of the work’s title, which means “the spinning top” in French, downplay the highbrow associations of sculpture, emphasizing its everyday, even toy-like, qualities and cheekily referencing the rotary mode in which it was created.