"Down in Vauxhall in London, three artists have mashed themselves together to create the most revolting visual soup imaginable, an exhibition that isn't so much the sum of its parts as a total negation of anything good any of them has ever done. Whatever qualities YBA kingpin Damien Hirst and street artists Shepard Fairey and Invader might have, none of them are on display in this staggeringly vast exhibition"
"The show is made up largely of collaborations between the artists, Hirst's dots and medical cabinets smashed brutally and heinously together with Invader's little ceramic aliens and Fairey's leaden posterised Photoshoppery. There's a wall of Fairey's Obey logo plastered over Hirst spin and flower paintings, adding nothing to something that wasn't good to start with. My jaw dropped when I saw the huge Hirst formaldehyde case with an invader alien drowning in the blue fluid it was like walking in on a crime scene."
"And somehow, it only gets worse. A medical cabinet filled with Obey-logo pills, diamante-encrusted Space Invaders, grim butterfly paintings with some ludicrous Fairey propaganda woman staring out at you, countless 8-bit pixelated portraits of Lou Reed and Sid Vicious. It's as if someone let the most annoying teenager you've ever met make some art. At one point there's an enormous triple portrait featuring what might be Malala Yousafzai and Miley Cyrus plastered with scalpel blades. It's all juvenile, dumb, silly imagery that does not work"
Three artists—Damien Hirst, Shepard Fairey, and Invader—have produced large-scale collaborative works that combine Hirst's dots and medical cabinets with Invader's ceramic aliens and Fairey's posterized imagery. Massive rooms display mashups such as an Invader alien submerged in a Hirst formaldehyde case, a medical cabinet filled with Obey-logo pills, diamante-encrusted Space Invaders, grim butterfly paintings overlaid with Fairey propaganda figures, and countless 8-bit pixelated portraits. The combinations read as juvenile and graceless, often amplifying the worst qualities of each artist rather than creating productive contrasts. The exhibition's scale intensifies the sense of aesthetic excess and visual exhaustion.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]