16 Oct Death in the Afternoon @ The Minotaur
Here’s my piece from The Minotaur show, currently running in the Old Vic Tunnels. I was given the brief about a year ago so I was pretty excited about all the possibilities that the Minotaur could bring given my work’s ongoing interest in masculinity, power and ego and all that blah blah blah..
This year I’ve started doing a series of shoots with photographer Eoghan Brennan to use as source material and for this painting I took Ramey’s 1826 sculpture of Thesseus slaying the minotaur as a starting point. I recreated it, replacing Thesseus with Jatinder (an Indian/English mate of mine) and I dressed him up as a matador.
I listen to the news a lot in the studio, and one of the main stories in the last few months as I’ve been thinking about this piece has been the instability in the global markets (I never really understand any of this) and in particular the fragility of the euro. My own country has had no small part to play in the euro’s woes but for the purpose of this painting I liked the symbolism of the Minotaur, that great charachter of Greek and European mythology on his back about to be slayed by the rising Asian economies.
