
Untitled, 2010 - Ed Templeton
about this work
Untitled (2010) is based on Everybody wants to fuck young girls, an acrylic on paper Templeton painted in 2009. The work is inspired by the famous arrest of Polish-French film director Roman Polanski based on an American warrant from 1978. The director of Chinatown, Rosemary's Baby and The Pianist, whose pregnant wife Sharon Tate was butchered in their home by Charles Manson's cult followers in 1969, was arrested in a Zurich airport in 2009 after having lived in exile for 31 years.
Polanski was 44 and already a twice-Oscar-nominated director in March 1977 when he had sex with Samantha Gailey, a 13-year-old model he had hired for a photo shoot, at Jack Nicholson's house in Los Angeles. He has argued that the sex was consensual, saying the girl was "not unresponsive", though Gailey said he drugged her with painkillers and champagne before assaulting her. The director pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse in a deal with prosecutors that saw them drop charges of rape, drugging and sodomy, which could have carried a life sentence, but fled the country anyway in February 1978 when it became apparent that he was likely to serve time in prison.
This edition was published on the occasion of Ed Templeton's solo exhibition The Cemetery of Reason at S.M.A.K. in Ghent in 2010.