$1,450.00

Steel | 14”x3”x7”

Artist Statement: Bending the Knee

Bending the Knee is a welded metal sculpture composed of square and rectangular tubing —industrial, masculine, institutional. It depicts a single figure forged from steel, bent, contorted, stripped of individual shape, whose posture betrays obedience, not strength.

This is not reverence. It is surrender.

Bending the Knee is a portrait of how power, when wrapped in spectacle and fear, can compel even the mightiest institutions to submit. Universities, law firms, media empires, corporations, and everyday citizens have buckled under the weight of a president who would be king—who demands loyalty not to country, but to himself.

The kneeling figure could be a law firm with its head bowed, spine collapsed. A media conglomerate folded in submission. A university hunched with its back to truth. Each is bent, not broken—but willing.

The sculpture critiques the rise of authoritarian deference in American public life—the performative loyalty oaths, the partisan twisting of legal norms, the cowardice of institutions that once claimed to champion truth, liberty, and independence.

Bending the Knee asks: What does it take for the powerful to kneel? Fear? Opportunity? Silence? And what happens when they refuse to rise? Bending the Knee is not about Trump alone—it’s about the machinery that enables him. And the courage it takes to stand.