The collections

Villa of the Mysteries · Pompeii, c. 60 BC

The Mysteries

The wildest room in Roman art — reproduced faithfully, and treated in motion and light.

The frieze that runs around the walls of a Pompeian villa is an initiation sequence — the reading of the rite, the startled initiate, the unveiling, the dance. The house reproduces it faithfully, and treats it: the same lines, turned up until they hum. Everything added is motion; every line is Pompeii's.

13 pieces hanging

Greek vase frenzy

The Maenads

Dionysos, satyrs, the dance — the god sailing under the vine.

Black-figure and red-figure frenzy from the vase corpus. Exekias' cup of the god sailing under a mast grown into a vine leads the collection: the oldest wine-dark dream in the canon.

15 pieces hanging

House originals · Homer's epithet as a series

The Wine-Dark Sea

Oceanic wine colour fields; the pour as tide. Edition-controlled.

Homer called the sea oînops — wine-faced. The house takes the epithet literally: colour fields where wine and water become one surface, iridescent film on a dark tide. Original works of the atelier, numbered in the Edition Ledger.

1 piece hanging

House originals · high-speed pour + stain

The Spill

One pour, one thousandth of a second — the bloom on linen. Edition-controlled.

The shot library at its most kinetic: high-speed pour and stain photography as art — the bloom on white linen, the ruin of a perfect table, the crown of droplets at the rim. Original works, numbered, sold with the certificate.

11 pieces hanging

House originals · invented heraldry

Vin Fou

The label art gone feral — invented houses, original heraldry, acid registers.

The fictional cellar of a madder world: houses that never existed, wearing their own heraldry, labelled in place-poetry from countries off every map. Original works of the atelier — the mark doctrine is linted hardest here, because every house on these walls is one the house invented.

11 pieces hanging

Public domain · the museums’ own

The Cellar

Wine as the great museums kept it — public-domain paintings, restored for the wall.

Wine was painted for centuries before it was photographed. These are faithful reproductions of public-domain paintings — Bacchus in his vine-leaves, a table of bottles and fruit, a riverside lunch — released open-access by the museums that hold the originals and printed from the actual archive scan. Every piece names its museum, its accession, and its date; a reproduction publishes only once that source record is direct-fetch confirmed.

12 pieces hanging

Belle Époque café-concert posters · public domain

The Affiche

The lithograph and the late night — the poster art of the drinking age.

Before wine had photographs it had the affiche — the stone-litho posters that hung the cafés-concerts and cabarets of Belle Époque Paris, where the wine and the absinthe went round until dawn. These are faithful reproductions of public-domain lithographs held open-access by The Art Institute of Chicago — the milieu, not the bottle. Each names its museum, its accession, and its year; a reproduction publishes only once that source record is direct-fetch confirmed. (The famous wine-brand posters we leave alone: their houses are gone but the trademarks are not.)

3 pieces hanging