Pop Culture Heroes as Stained Glass Saints

Speaking of Albert Hoffman and innovative portraiture…Neal Fox’s latest project elevates pop heroes and counter culture luminaries to the status of sainthood through the unique medium of stained glass. Working with Franz Mayer of Munich, Fox produced a dozen 8-inch stained glass windows exhibited in a single room called Beware of the God:

As traditional church windows show the iconography of saints, through representations of events in their lives, instruments of martyrdom and iconic motifs, Fox plays with the symbolism of each character’s cult of personality; Albert Hoffman takes a psychedelic bicycle ride above the LSD molecule, J G Ballard dissects the world, surrounded by 20th Century imagery and the eroticism of the car crash, and Johnny Cash holds his inner demon in chains after a religious experience in Nickerjack cave. One quality in particular binds these characters and the others together; a refusal to conform and conviction in their own ideology.

The “alternative church of alternative saints” is open now through August 10th at Daniel Blau Gallery in London. Go spill your sins to these patron saints…