Artists Alex Pardee and “Skinner†holed up for three weeks in a California studio recently, then came out the other end of their creative confab with a series of graphic demolition jobs that make brightly colored mincemeat of pop-culture icons.
Their Butcher Kings show, on display at Los Angeles’ Gallery 1998 through Oct. 20, includes peppy takedowns of characters like the Incredible Hulk, Luke Skywalker and Freddy Krueger. Forget respectful homage: Pardee and Skinner take delight in reconfiguring these and other familiar visages into grotesques that radiate a bizarre star power all their own.
Skinner explained the method behind Butcher Kings‘ mad graphics in an e-mail to Wired.com. “We took the existing vocabulary of what we had experienced as young kids of the ’80s, genetically encode that with the understanding of the popular zeitgeist today and put it in a blender with our sardonic and strange outlooks,†he said.
