Monster Chetwynd - Bat Opera (Heavy Metal) - 2019
Monster Chetwynd’s Bat Opera (Heavy Metal) Print Portfolio presents eight new images adapted from her ongoing Bat Opera series of paintings. This is a rare chance to own a substantial artwork by the Turner Prize nominated artist at a special price as a fundraiser for Eastside Projects.
Combining the delicate, sensitive paintings of what the artist describes as ‘unworthy subject matter’ with the graphic approach of Heavy Metal imagery, Chetwynd’s bats link her story telling and performative processes with the metal genre’s use of heavy distortion and dark depressing subject matter. The artist sees her bats as anti-heroes, channelling Heavy Metal’s working class expression of industrial control through the occult threatening of traditional values, set against the backdrop of her new exhibition Hell Mouth 3 and Home of Metal’s celebration of Black Sabbath’s 50th Anniversary and the legacies of Heavy Metal.
Along with the Metal influences and legends, such as Ozzy Osbourne’s infamous biting the head off a bat on stage in the early 1980s, Chetwynd’s series of beautiful miniature paintings depict different species of bats in varying settings and groupings and are inspired by the miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard, Constable’s cloud studies, and zoological staged photography.
Chetwynd explains her fascination with bats: “They pollinate at night, they have radar, they are mammals with wings and, of course, they have the stigma of evil. They are perfect as unworthy subject matter. Early on I had a quick recognition that I could use them as comic anti-heroes. That classic tension in painting between repulsion and attraction… Within painting discourse this can be dubbed simplistic, but for me, this makes them great subject matter — intriguing, repulsive, yet anthropomorphic qualities and, again, a history of being associated with evil.”
Medium: 8 silkscreen prints in 3 colours on mirrored silver polychrome card and presented in a black portfolio
Size: 26 x 34 cm each
Edition of 50
Signed and numbered
Special Price: £ 500 (£ 1,500 after 27 July 2019 )
This Monster Chetwynd print portfolio is available at East Side Projects
