Rich purples lend lushness to this overstuffed interior, whose piles of clothing and jumble of furnishings suggest the morning after a raucous night of mayhem. The painting’s title, Hangover Square(2005), is a pun on London’s upscale green Hanover Square, one that artist Cecily Brown gladly borrowed from a 1941 novel. With its unabashed clutter, the disarrayed room foreshadows Brown’s return to painting crowded interiors 15 years later, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
Knight Horrors looks like some sort of surreal still life extracted from a child’s fever dream — and the longer you look, the stranger it gets. A tiny armored knight on horseback occupies the center of the scene, surrounded by an outrageous assortment of creatures and characters: a grinning finger puppet-style monster perched on the helmet of a Roman soldier, a grimacing gremlin, a colorful parrot, a rat, a flamingo, a skull and assorted other fantastical beings. It’s part cabinet of curiosities, part nightmare, and part seriously weird family portrait.
Painted in 1985 by American artist Aaron Bohrod, Knight Horrors is an oil painting on gesso panel measuring just 12 by 16 inches. The title itself seems to contain a little visual joke: Knight Horrors sounds suspiciously like “night terrors,” which makes the painting feel like a parade of creatures that have escaped from somebody’s particularly bizarre dream. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Knight Horrors by Aaron Bohrod→
I’ve been a fan of artist German artist Katharina Fritsch and her oeuvre of hyper-realistic (and often surreal) sculptures since I first met These Guys. This past May, I wandered into Matthew Marks Gallery and was happily supposed to find a selection of her sculptues on view! Having experienced many family camping trips a small child, I was particularly entranced by Auto und Wohnwagen / Car and Caravan (1079 / 2026). Sure, it looks like a perfectly ordinary road-trip scene — a sleek black car pulling a little white caravan. But this is definitely not your average family vacation. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Katharina Fritsch, Car and Caravan→
Though Roy Lichtenstein’s style of comic-derived pop art is now well known, it was radical in the early 1960s. Appropriating the visual language of American mass culture, such as Mickey Mouse, Coca-Cola, and the “funny pages,“ Lichtenstein found his artistic voice by making paintings that at first did not appear to be art. This was his cover – part camouflage, and part red herring – that allowed him to insert his own practice into the art historical milieu; he was in dialogue with the grades, reprising themes from antiquity. I… I’m Sorry! (1965 – 66) is a portrait of Eve as a modern-day woman. Lichtenstein renders her apology unclear, revealing layers of interpretation: is she apologizing for eating the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge? Is she breaking our hearts? Is she sincere with her stammering words? Her simplified features belie the nuanced complexities of her declaration.
In France in 1975, screenwriter Dan O’Bannon was collaborating with Director Alejandro Jodorowsky on an adaptation of Frank Herbert‘s 1965 novel, Dune, when he met the artist HR Giger. Jodorowsky had been introduced to Giger’s work by Salvador Dali, and had brought him on to create designs for the film.
While the feature ultimately fell through, O’Bannon couldn’t get Giger’s drawings out of his head. The screenwriter recalled “ending up writing a script about a Giger monster,” which would eventually become the influential franchise Alien. Continue reading Eye On Design: HR Giger’s Necronom 2005 (Alien 3 Model)→
