The Beast Inside Us, 1998-1999
Acrylic Paintings on Canvas, 30” x 60”
Sandra Gering Gallery, NY NY
The Beast Inside Us, 1998
10' x 18' scanachrome billboards
Exit Festival, Maison des Arts, Creteil, France
Maubeuge Festival, Le Manege, Maubeuge, France
The Center for Contemporary Art, Geneva, Switzerland
The Beast Inside Us was a series of images produced both as monumental scanachrome vinyl billboards, acrylic paintings on canvas, and latex wall paintings, all conceived of as (anti)classical friezes. For The Beast, characters culled from classical children's literature were repainted by the artist and reproduced at architectural scale, arranged in a shallow space. Expanded to monumental proportions, delicate gouache brush strokes reify to become expressionistic slashes and the fairy tales characters of childhood reveal their base, archaic and sometimes terrifying natures.
The billboards were first produced in 1998 for the Exit new media festival, at the Maison des Arts, Creteil, France and the Maubeuge Festival, Le Manege, Maubeuge, France and later shown at the Centre D'Art Contemporain in Geneva. The acrylic paintings and wall painting were created for the Sandra Gering Gallery, NY, in 1999. With their saturated colors and high production values, these works are intended for tectonic presentation, to redefine the language of painting at a public scale.