Bacchus Drawing

The impetus for Krebs-Schade’s current body of work has been to explore painting as a figurative expression of desire. The spirit of excess, eroticism and the nature of sexual attraction, heroism and society’s adulation of male historic and sporting figure are all elements of his reasons for representing the male nude. Notwithstanding artists such as Michelangelo and Caravaggio, the male nude in art history has often been an object of neglect, and to redress this imbalance his view is a light-hearted and metaphoric one. With 18th-century ceiling fresco painters’ influences’, like Giambattista Tiepolo, he is interested in representations of the heavens, foreshortened figures in illusionistic spaces, and pictorial compositions that could dominate large interiors. Krebs-Schade moved from images of the Baroque and Rococo apotheosis, to football “eye candy” in a continuation of the investigation of these themes. By using children’s action figures and life-models posed in statuesque forms, he has tried to subvert the homoerotic element in photographic images of sporting heroes - that turn them into gods, in particular the iconic Aussie A.F.L. figure, and turn them into something amusing.