Spartacus Chetwynd

The UK-based artist Spartacus Chetwynd is known for her baroque, surreal performances that humorously bring together multiple visual references from art history and pop culture. One of Chetwynd's 2007 site-specific performances, sponsored by New York's Creative Time, was titled: "Soylent Green, King Kong, Kasuma & Paul Auster Improvs." She liberally mixes references like Yves Klein's Anthropometries and Hieronymous Bosch characters with heavy metal and Michael Jackson's Thriller, somehow producing a unified whole that is evocative of how our culture disseminates information. As well as performances, Chetwynd who graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MFA in painting, produced a series of small canvases in 2004 and 2005 entitled Bat Opera. They also quote pop culture, while featuring obscure bits of Romanticism gleaned from art history and literature. A well-designed introduction to this emerging artist’s work, this volume is printed on 12 differently colored papers.