Artnose Artists

 Mimmo Gulbenkian 

 Born Brooklyn, New Jersey, 1956. Self taught

  Modern Art is Pants, Acrylic on canvas, 2002

Gulbenkian's big bold canvases - many of them triptychs in genuflection towards the great religious narratives of early European Renaissance art, to which Gulbenkian believes all contemporary art is indebted - invite obvious comparison with the early giants of Pop, particularly Lichtenstein. 

However, Gulbenkian, who has no involvement whatever in the making of his paintings, instead employing a team of assistants to both devise and execute the work for him, sees contemporary art as nothing more than decoration.

"Art is dead," declares Gulbenkian with characteristic rhetorical flourish. "And I'm not using the word 'dead' in a flaky Fukuyama way, to suggest historical deadness as some kind of postmodern ontological crisis, but in an altogether more radical sense. It is deeply dead, moribund, cold in the grave, stiff as a corpse, riddled with rats, eaten by maggots, festering, pustulent, weeping and sulphurous. My work signals that deadness in an oblique way by deluding the onlooker into a sense of bright optimism, for they all quickly realise, after some time viewing this stuff, that they too will soon be dead."

 Homage to Roberto Bildenberger, 1999. 
 Acrylic on linen, triptych, 5ft 6in by 17ft 6in. £575,000

Gulbenkian's apocalyptic take on the art world is in keen demand in chic Manhattan cultural circles. Since his marriage to his partner, the furniture designer David Lisselhof, Gulbenkian has branched into corporate interior design and is now the most sought-after decorator on the eastern seaboard. 

Even his interior schemes - full of frenetic bursts of primary colour in dazzling, often garish combinations, have a bleak subtext. "We're all on a one-way tram into terra firma, baby, make no mistake. Like the Muslim man said, 'Every soul shall have a taste of death, and only on the Day of Judgement shall you be paid your full recompense.' So carpe diem buddy! Grasp the moment! Commission me now, before it's too late!"

Artnose Artists - Quick Links

  Yuk Foo & Fuk Yoo
  Wim Waals
  Euan Mee
  Pixel Popadopoulos
  Diego Vasquez
  Juan Peccadiño (The Barber of Solihull)
  Mimmo Gulbenkian

Put our mini-ad
on your website

home l archive l artists l critics l small ads l dating l links l letters l about