Kazuhiko Nakamura's Mechanical Mirage

A Japanese modern artist. We read in his site his introduction of him and his work:

"I am inspired by surrealism and cyberpunk styles of art. I find myself drawn to 19th century machine designs and armor among other things from that time period as motif. All of these images have been created with a portrait style while still containing a puzzle type quality."

Visit his SITE to see more images and this SITE to read more about each piece of his work

Album: Where Lovers Mourn, Band: Draconian (2004)

Gothic doom melodic and atmospheric metal. More in allmusic

Joel Peter Witkin's transgressive photographic art

Ars Moriendi

O Joel Peter Witkin (1939-) είναι Αμερικανός καλλιτεχνικός φωτογράφος, γνωστός για τις μακάβριες και άκρως ενοχλητικές φωτογραφίες του με πτώματα, κομμένα ανθρώπινα μέλη, ανθρώπους με δυσμορφίες, ιδιομορφίες και πολύ γυμνό, τα οποία τα σκηνοθετεί στην φωτογράφηση με ακόμα πιο σουρεαλιστικό και γκροτέσκο τρόπο.


Η αυστηρή καθολική του ανατροφή, καθώς και ένα φρικιαστικό τροχαίο που είδε όταν ήταν παιδί (τρια αυτοκίνητα συγκρούστηκαν και από το ένα που ανατράπηκε κύλησε ένα κεφάλι κοριτσιού προς αυτόν, ο Witkin έσκυψε να το αγγίξει και να του μιλήσει, αλλά οι γονείς τον τράβηξαν).

Queer saint

Λέγεται, μάλιστα, ότι τα πιο προκλητικά για το κοινό αίσθημα έργα του τα σκηνοθετεί στο Μεξικό για να αποφύγει νομικά κωλύματα στις ΗΠΑ σχετικά με την ηθική απέναντι στο νεκρό σώμα.

Cupid and centaur

Joel Peter Witkin (1939-) is an American photographer who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His work often deals with such themes as death, corpses (and sometimes dismembered portions thereof), and various outsiders such as dwarfs, transsexuals, hermaphrodites, and physically deformed people. Witkin's complex tableaux often recall religious episodes or famous classical paintings.

Chinatown

Witkin claims that his vision and sensibility were initiated by an episode he witnessed when he was just a small child, a car accident that occurred in front of his house in which a little girl was decapitated.

The Kiss

"It happened on a Sunday when my mother was escorting my twin brother and me down the steps of the tenement where we lived. We were going to church. While walking down the hallway to the entrance of the building, we heard an incredible crash mixed with screaming and cries for help. The accident involved three cars, all with families in them. Somehow, in the confusion, I was no longer holding my mother's hand. At the place where I stood at the curb, I could see something rolling from one of the overturned cars. It stopped at the curb where I stood. It was the head of a little girl. I bent down to touch the face, to speak to it -- but before I could touch it someone carried me away".

Reminiscent of portrait as a vanity

He also claims that the difficulties in his family were an influence for his work too. ome of Witkin's works, namely those with corpses in them, have had to be created in Mexico in order to get around restrictive US laws. Because of the transgressive nature of the contents of his pictures, his works have been labeled exploitative and have sometimes shocked public opinion.

Myself as dead clown

Collector of Fluids

His techniques include scratching the negative, bleaching or toning the print, and using a hands-in-the-chemicals printing technique. This experimentation began after seeing a 19th-century ambrotype of a woman and her ex-lover who had been scratched from the frame. (Wikipedia)

You can see HERE and HERE much more provoking and disturbing photos by Witkin

Woman breast feeding an eel

Mother and child with retractor screaming

Interrupted Reading

Dog on a pillow

Paul Rumsey: Skeletons

Danse Macabre

Paul Rumsey (born May 14, 1956 in Essex) is a British graphic artist who works in the tradition of the grotesque and the fantastic. Most of his work is made in charcoal. His imagery is ambiguous, often both comic and disturbing, many of the ideas coming from dreams. (art&popularculture). Visit his SITE for more information and to see more of his interesting work.

Boris Vallejo, Epic Fantasy part 4

Boris Vallejo (born January 8, 1941) is a Peruvian-born American painter. He emigrated to the United States in 1964, and he currently resides in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He frequently works with Julie Bell, his wife, painter and model.

Vallejo works almost exclusively in the fantasy and erotica genres. His hyper-representational paintings have graced the covers of dozens of science fiction paperbacks and are featured in a series of best-selling glossy calendars. Subjects of his paintings are typically gods, monsters, and well-muscled male and female barbarians engaged in battle. Some of his male figures were modeled by Vallejo himself, and many of his later female characters were modeled by his wife. His latest works still retain heavy fantasy elements, but lean more towards the erotic rather than pure fantasy themes. (wikipedia)

Here is his personal site

Lustmord: Sexual murder in art in Weimar between the two World Wars

George Gorsz "John the Sex Murderer" (1918)

Μετά τον Α’ Παγκόσμιο πόλεμο, την περίοδο της Βαϊμάρης στη Γερμανία υπήρξε μια τάση να αισθητικοποιηθεί το σεξουαλικό έγκλημα, ειδικά μετά από κάποια σειρά τέτοιων πραγματικών φόνων που συντάραξαν την κοινωνία. Πολλοί καλλιτέχνες, με πιο εξέχοντες τους Otto Dix και George Gorsz, παρήγαναν έναν αξιοσημείωτα μεγάλο αριθμό σχετικών έργων (πίνακες, σχέδια, φωτογραφήσεις, κλπ) με τέτοια σοκαριστική θεματολογία, είτε σε μια προσπάθεια να εξερευνήσουν την άβυσσο του ασυνείδητού τους, είτε με προκλητική διάθεση απέναντι στην κοινωνική κρίση του μεσοπολέμου στη Γερμανία και την ασταθή δημοκρατία της Βαϊμάρης. Ένα ενδιαφέρον βιβλίο που ερευνά διαχρονικά το σεξουαλικό έγκλημα με αφετηρία αυτά τα έργα της περιόδου της Βαϊμάρης είναι το Lustmord: “Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany” της Maria Tatar.

Otto Dix "Lustmord"

Η νοσηρή περιέργεια και ενδιαφέρον για το σεξουαλικό έγκλημα αποδίδεται πολύ παραστατικά στη γερμανική λέξη του σεξουαλικού εγκλήματος Lustmord (αντλώντας ηδονή από το θάνατο) και ο τρόπος αναπαράστασης αυτών των φόνων προκαλεί συγχρόνως ανάμικτα αισθήματα απώθησης και γοητείας. Οι αναπαραστάσεις αυτές είναι, από τη μια μεριά, καθηλωτικές μέσα από την παραμορφωτική αποστασιοποιημένη απεικόνιση της βίας που κινητοποιεί σεξουαλικές φαντασιώσεις, και από την άλλη, απωθητικές λόγω της νοσηρής ασελγούς εικόνας τους.

Δεν είναι φυσικά περιορισμένο το φαινόμενο μόνο στην περίοδο της Βαϊμάρης, αν και εκείνη την εποχή, με την εκρηκτική πρόοδο της τέχνης, του απόγειου της ψυχανάλυσης και της γνώσης του ασυνείδητου, δικαιολογείται η αναζωπύρωση τέτοιου ενδιαφέροντος σε συνδυασμό, μάλιστα, με την άσχημη κοινωνική και πολιτική κατάσταση.

Otto Dix "Lustmord" (1922)

After the World War I in Weimar rebublic in Germany, there is a tension to aeshetize sexual murders, especially after some such actual murders that shocked society. Many artists produced a noticeable large number of drawings, painting or photos with such disturbing gory thematology, either exploring their dark side of their unconscious desires, or with an attitude to provoke by giving a grotesque vision of the after war social crisis in Weimar. An interesting book which investigates sexual murder in history (Lustmord in German) is that of Maria Tatar: Lustmord: “Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany” by focusing on the two most famous artists who dealt with Lustmord in their paintings” Otto Dix and George Grosz. We read about this book:

Rene Magritte "The Menaced Assasin" (1927)

Tatar focuses attention on the politically turbulent Weimar Republic, often viewed as the birthplace of a transgressive avant-garde modernism, where representations of female sexual mutilation abound…. Tatar show that male artists openly identified with real-life sexual murderers--George Grosz posed as Jack the Ripper in a photograph where his model and future wife was the target of his knife--but she also reveals the ways in which victims were disavowed and erased.

Otto Dix "Lustmord" (1922)

Tatar first analyzes actual cases of sexual murder that aroused wide public interest in Weimar Germany. She then considers how the representation of murdered women in visual and literary works functions as a strategy for managing social and sexual anxieties, and shows how violence against women can be linked to the war trauma, to urban pathologies, and to the politics of cultural production and biological reproduction.

George Grosz, as Jack the Ripper,
Self-Portrait with Eva Peters
in the Artist's Studio, 1918

Also on an essay with the same subject we read:

Otto Dix "Lustmord" (1922)

In her book Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany, Maria Tater investigates the gender politics of cultural production in Germany during the pre- World War II era, specifically as it operated through the artistic representations of sexual murder or lustmord made popular by George Grosz and Otto Dix. This period has been referred to as one of a modernist movement in art that aestheticized violence and was funded by a transgressive energy that marks the avant- garde.

Rudolph Schlichter "Lustmord" (1924)

Tater, however, reads the situation of sexual murder in the art work of Weimar Germany as more than an avant-garde aesthetic convention or genre. She argues that it is symptomatic of a culture that views women as icons of licentious sexuality, threats to masculinity, and as mothers as agents against sexual prohibitions.

Realistic Lustmord painting by Anomymous
from the book: Voluptuous Panic:
The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin by Mel Gordon

Tater makes clear that the representations of sexual murder are not just eviscerated female bodies in lewd positions, but that the subject matter is lustful. The German term Lustmord implies desire or pleasure along with sexual gain from the murderous act or representation. Women are represented as mutilated female bodies which are objects of both fascination and dread. Such representations are both riveting in their displays of disfiguring violence, and also repugnant in the detail of morbid carnality.

Carl Hofer "Lustmord" (1923)

Heinrich-Maria Davinghausen (1894 -1970) Sex Murdrerer