Artworks2008Untitled Cloud Piss Diptych

A long blue-green splash resembling a cloud on two bronze coloured landscape panels, caused by oxidised urine on a copper prepared canvas. Based on Andy Warhol’s Oxidiation Paintings.

These elegiac works steal much from previous paintings by Otto Muhl, Hermann Nietsche and other 70’s actionists, as well as the great recycler and thief of imagery Warhol, who in the early 1980’s made a series of oxidization works created by his assistant’s urination. The copper ground and cobalt fractals of these works brings echoes of Klimt and the decorative precursors of the actionists, but this is simultaneously counteracted by the transgressive process of their production: bodily waste, the ultimate form of disposable human rubbish used to make marks on canvas. This series of works first came out of a performance at Riflemaker gallery in London during the exhibition ‘Me as Him’ 1997 where camouflage fright wig screenprints of the artists as Warhol were on display. During the evening visitors were invited to urinate on a collection of pre-prepared canvases in an extrovertly collaborative exercise. The signature of mark making, in random spurts, rushes and pools, makes a corrosive recycling of ideas.