BEN FROST — 20TH CENTURY VIOLATOR
Portrait print: 40.5cm x 55cm
Edition size: 75
Print technology: Archival colourfast inks
Stock: 290GSM Moab Entrada bright white watercolour paper
Signed and numbered by the artist
"This painting was made for an exhibition I did in San Francisco, and is definitely one of my favourite large paintings I've done in the last year or so. The painting is called '20th Century Violator' and it relates to how I see myself as an artist, and society's place in the scheme of things. My process is one of taking images, subverting them and juxtaposing them into weird situations, so it's very much like looking back at the 20th century and fucking with it - or 'violating' it. I have a love/hate affair with advertising and the media, which also includes the morals and values of previous generations.
The female protagonist in the center of the image peers sultry and exotic over a shoulder of her own death - or a 'projected' death that wants to 'Have and To Kill' rather than to 'Have and To Hold'. The skull on her back is from a poster for the movie Evil Dead 2 (one of my favourite series of films) which reflects a contrasting duplicity of attraction and repulsion that I often explore in my work.
I've alluded to the turmoils of relationships with the pistol image on the left. It features a love heart on the handle, with a rose in the barrel, and the phrase 'like a boss' along the side - which is juxtaposed with the couple kissing beneath it and a frightened rabbit.
In the background there is a landscape scene - on the right there is a colorful rainbow with a fairytale castle and sheep in the fields and on the left we see the same scene in banal greys, with the same sheep dead in the field.
So there is darkness and light, old and new, hope and distraught - all opposing emotions and ideas that we experience often simultaneously in the rollercoaster that is life."
~ Ben Frost
More