Swiss-born artist Thomas Hirschhorn is best known for his confrontational sculptures and room-sized installations. As in Chandelier with Hands, these works include such non-traditional materials as mannequin parts, cardboard, packing tape, and bubble wrap. Much of the artist’s work veers away from orthodox standards of sculptural beauty, such as the harmonious balancing of volumes and shapes and the careful crafting of materials including marble, fine woods, or metals. Through his precarious, seemingly roughly made constructions and severed and bound forms referencing the human figure, Hirschhorn makes an abstracted but morally-charged comment on violence in contemporary society. This sculpture is part of a body of work in which the artist examined the concept of “concretion,” a term used both in geology (to refer to a particular growth of sedimentary rock), and medicine (to refer to hardened growths of cells in the body). Regarding his exploration of concretion, Hirschhorn wrote, “I want to give form to what is interesting to me in this term today: the hardening. The hardening of the world in which I live. This hardening comes from the hardening of each of us.... [It] is a problem, a tumor, a cancer, an uncontrollable disease.”