Change the context of Picasso’s creations and they could be strange cartoon characters. 

Both Picasso and Disney were self proclaimed entertainers. 
Did he influence popular culture? Did popular culture influence him?

Maybe the artist himself was a great trickster...Picasso's quixotry can be found in something he said to the writer Giovanni Papini in 1952: "Today, as you know, I am famous, I am rich. But when I am alone with myself, I haven't the courage to consider myself an artist in the ancient sense of the word. Great painters are people like Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya. I am only a public entertainer who has understood the times and has exploited as best he could the imbecility, the vanity and the greed of his contemporaries. "

The Artists's Studio

Bowden's new work arcs back to past themes of his; the excesses of consumerist society, the blurring of reality and fantasy, the personification of nature.. a dystopian world superseded by cartoonesque replicas of itself, a renegade Disney. These very recent paintings draw the viewer in with their bright colours and the disarming happy faces, their cartoon menageries. Upon closer inspection though, there is something disquieting about the scenes depicted. 

The Silent Crowd

My Pisney paintings are an amalgam, a cultural compression of fine art and pop culture. 
I love the graphic power of cartoons and I see how Picasso also had a freedom to rearrange, deconstruct and reconfigure the visual world. This series is part homage and part exploration of new hybrids that echo the fragmented nature of experience. 

The World of Pisney

Fallen Icons

An upside down world of inverted values, of real fakes and fake facts. 
High and low coalescing in singular multi-images.

Hybrids and visual glitches. The end of innocence and the pollution of the real.

A corrupted file. Cultural vandalism and a mistrust of institutions.

A search for footing in the quicksand of the present. A cross-pollinated newsfeed.

Pornography. An abuse of power. A call for rebellion.

A push and pull between the sacred and the profane, between Beauty and the Beast.

Fallen Icons

These works have been made during the confinement period and are an emotional response to the efforts and resilience of the front line health workers tackling the victims of the Corona virus outbreak. 


The Confinement Paintings 

This series explores a cultural backwash. A regurgitation of undigested waste. Societies drains are blocked, and our effluence is rising back up to the surface.

Welcome to ‘The Flood’.

Garth Bowden