
GLEN WEXLER
REQUIEM: SOLD OUR SOUL (2003)
Dimensions: 45 x 50 in.
Edition: 10 + 1 AP
Medium: Archival pigment print, mounted to Dibond, matte acrylic facemount
Frame: Charcoal gray wood float frame
Price: $9,800
Originally exhibited at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame & Museum, Requiem: Sold Our Soul stages a dramatic meditation on sacrifice, performance, and survival within systems of power. At the center of a monumental, vaulted space, a lone cellist performs atop a narrow pillar, suspended between an abyss below and a shaft of light above. The image captures a charged threshold in which vulnerability and defiance coexist.
Drawing on the visual language of ritual and architecture, the work constructs a contemporary allegory of endurance. The domed interior reads as both sanctuary and containment—a purgatorial arena of spectacle, judgment, and control—while the musician’s presence transforms it through intensity, discipline, and expression. Rather than depicting collapse, the image centers the act of making sound in a space that seems designed to test, contain, or
diminish the individual.
Its force lies in unresolved tension: beauty and severity, transcendence and confinement, performance and reckoning. Operatic and intimate at once, the work holds the viewer in a suspended space where transformation feels possible, but never guaranteed.
