The greatest conceptual artist working today has made another masterpiece. Pimlico Wilde are pleased to present Cows, Clouds, Carpets to the market.
Year: 2025
Medium: Fog brought from the mid-Atlantic, two borrowed dairy cows (rotated weekly), three flying carpets (grounded by health and safety), sandwiches (triangular), and a ceiling painted to look like the floor.
Dimensions: Constantly shifting.
Davos’ “Cows, Clouds, Carpets” presents itself as a meditation on weight and levity, earth and sky, udder and ether. Visitors enter the gallery to discover two cows placidly grazing on a carpet of artificial turf. Above them, three ornate Persian flying carpets should hover. A wall text explains that owing to health and safety restrictions, the carpets have had to be placed on the ground, the visitor must imagine them in flight.
A little mid-Atlantic fog is gently released every 47 seconds, obscuring visibility and encouraging visitors to step gingerly, lest they mistake a cow for a carpet or vice versa. The ceiling has been painted with meticulous trompe-l’œil to resemble the gallery floor, leaving some viewers unsure whether they are standing on the ground at all.
A small tray of sandwiches, replenished daily, rests on a low plinth near the entrance. They are triangular, crustless, and entirely untouched. They are both offering and warning.
“When we are no longer sure what is beneath us, we may finally understand what it means to float.”
— Davos
The cows, borrowed (not hired, this is important) from a farm in Kent, provide a necessary grounding element: slow, heavy, deliberate presences that counterbalance the illusory weightlessness being imagined above.
The sandwiches play a less obvious but no less important role. The artist insists they are not for eating. They represent sustenance denied, a reminder that conceptual nourishment is rarely digestible. Their triangular form, Davos claims, echoes both pyramid and wedge: “Forms that aspire, but never quite arrive.”
The fog ensures the work is never seen in full clarity, suggesting that understanding is always partial and that cows, too, can be ethereal if conditions permit.
Visitor Guidelines:
• Do not attempt to ride the carpets, no matter how strong the temptation.
• The cows may look approachable. They are not.
• Please do not eat the sandwiches. Buyable sandwiches are available in the café.
• If you lose your sense of up and down, sit quietly until the fog clears.
Price: £1.4 million (including painted ceiling and contractual rights to temporarily borrow cows. NB: the fog is not included and will have to be sourced separately by the purchaser.
Limited Edition Artifact: A triangular sandwich cast in resin (edition of 25), available for £190,000 each.
Critics’ Reactions:
• The Welsh Art Magazine : “A sublime balance between bovine mass and mystical lift.”
• The Harewood Guardian: “I watched a cow stare at a carpet for ten minutes. Magica; I left convinced of art’s continuing power.”
With “Cows, Clouds, Carpets”, Davos offers a profound, solemn meditation on the tension between heaviness and flight, sustenance and illusion, cow and carpet.
