These painterly chimera are cultural mash-ups. The result is a peculiar and fantastical cast of characters and scenarios, whether Nazi soldiers trampling through the snow towards a crashed UFO in the middle of a village scene by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Snow White making an uncomfortable guest appearance in an already troubling Balthus interior, or a guillotined head assuming a cameo role in an otherwise serene still life. Lenkiewicz's imagination and energy seem to be inexhaustible, concocting endless amazing hybrids such as iconic Renaissance paintings invaded by characters from nineteenth-century Japanese woodblocks, French Revolutionary masterpieces spliced with German Romanticism, or Cubism infiltrated by Victorian children's illustration. His striking paintings and drawings mine the hallowed halls of art history and popular culture in search of visual languages, imagery, themes, and motifs that he can appropriate, adapt, use, and abuse, bringing together different movements, genres, periods, and styles in dialogues that are surprising, innovative, and sometimes provocative. "item_description" : "This is the first major monograph on the work of one of Britain's most dynamic artists, Wolfe von Lenkiewicz.
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