From March 2024 until January 2025, two iterations of Paul Pfeiffer’s Incarnator series (2018–ongoing) were included in an installation at Venice’s Palazzo Grassi. The series was made in collaboration with artisans known as encarnadores (from the Latin word meaning “to make into flesh”) who produce santos (religious icons) for Catholic churches and private worship. The works shown in the exhibition belong to a series of hyper-realistic sculptures of the body parts of Justin Bieber, an archetypal pop star whose image has embodied a kind of eternal adolescence ever since he was “‘discovered” by the music industry at age twelve. In Pfeiffer’s work, Bieber’s slender, tattoo-covered body is dismembered, its parts dispersed on the walls of the exhibition. The sculptures bring to mind the power of saintly relics and of the crucified body of Jesus. Bieber, who identifies as Christian, is transformed into a contemporary embodiment of Christ in Pfeiffer’s work. Parallels with the devotional form of the crucifix are underscored by the care with which each part of the body is carved from wood and painted with meticulous detail. Pfeiffer creates an intriguing parallel between two types of devotion: one informed by Catholic religious tradition and the other promoted by a rapidly expanding media landscape and cult of celebrity. For Pfeiffer, Bieber “is emblematic of viral image circulation in the era of social media.”