Art Freaks: Bodypainted Mortals as Art Stars [NSFW]
We’ve seen contemporary art stars (and their signature works) as action figures, haute couture and marshmallows. Now, Swiss artist Olaf Breuning is using nude bodies as the canvas for replicating recognizable painters and paintings. Breuning covered each naked model in bodypaint from head to toe. He calls his series of photographs “Art Freaks“.
Maybe it’s due to bodypaint’s role in 1990s goth/fetish culture or its use by San Francisco street performers, but bodypaint is a pretty lowbrow medium. I guess then it’s interesting to kind of “slum it” with the biggest blue chip art on the market. (I enjoyed testing my art knowledge by naming the artist being represented in each photo. I got almost all of them!)
The press release for “Art Freaks” states:
Stemming from the artist’s recent investigation into his idiosyncratic relationship with modern and contemporary art, the larger than life-sized prints of elaborately painted bodies, which comprise The Art Freaks, conflate the tropes of so-called high and low artistic techniques as they discuss notions of kitsch, cliché, and reproduction.
Olaf Breuning’s “Art Freaks” are on display at Metro Pictures Gallery in New York now through October 29th.
Click through for closeups of NSFW NUDE Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami, Jeff Koons, Van Gogh, Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso, Cindy Sherman, Edvard Munch (scary!), Joan Miro, Piet Mondrian, Henri Matisse, Man Ray, Anseri Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, Yves Klein, Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois, Jasper Johns, Maurizio Anzeri and On Kawara. If you know the artists being represented by the nudes here that I haven’t included in this post, please leave a comment! (Mousing over Breuning’s photos gives a first name clue.)
