All Photos By Gail
At first glance, Old Fashioned (2001), a delicate ink-on-paper work by artist Mark Dean Veca, looks like something you’d find in your grandmother’s parlor: a vintage wallpaper design done in the classic French toile de Jouy style. But as your eyes linger on the piece, the façade of refinement starts to fall apart—in the most delightfully subversive way.
Olympic Swimmer / Gold Medalist Mark Spitz
Veca, known for blending ornamental elegance with pop-cultural chaos, uses this artwork to cleverly camouflage references from 1970s counterculture: underground comics, psychedelic iconography, advertising ephemera, and grotesque cartoon figures all lurk within the highly detailed patterns. The drawing lures you in with its tidy symmetry and soft lines, only to confront you with imagery that feels at once nostalgic and unsettling.
BatMan
By remixing high-brow aesthetics with low-brow cultural references, the artist blurs the line between decoration and disruption. The effect is both humorous and a little bit unnerving — a hallmark of his signature style. Old Fashioned isn’t just a visual treat; it’s a cultural time capsule wrapped in a riddle of taste, memory, and irreverence.
Archie Bunker as Portrayed by Actor Carroll O’Connor
It’s a perfect example of what happens when a skilled artist takes something familiar and turns it inside out — leaving you questioning what you just saw, and wanting to look again.
Photographed in the Deutsche Bank Offices at One Columbia Circle in Manhattan
MAD Magazine’s Alfred E. Newman