Oskar Kokoschka’s creepy doll girlfriend
The creepy doll girlfriend made for artist Oskar Kokoschka in 1919
Categories: Curiosities, Historical Art, Unsettling Things • Tags: art, artist, creepy, doll, erotic
Tag: art
Imposter family portraits
The family portraits in Hans Eijkelboom’s ‘With My Family’ series contain an unsettling secret.
Categories: Contemporary Art, Strange Photographs • Tags: art, family, photography, true crime, unsettling
Tony Fomison’s inner werewolf
Art and monsters are two of my all-time favorite things, so I’m in (weird, twisted) heaven when the two things combine. A strange, hairy beast lurks inside the soul of New Zealand artist Tony Fomison – head over to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa blog to read my full post about his remarkable paintings of hairy beasts. What does your inner monster look like? For New Zealand painter Tony Fomison (1939–1990) it was a creature drenched in darkness, […]
Categories: Contemporary Art, Curiosities • Tags: animal, art, curiosities, face, museum, new zealand, Tony Fomison, werewolf
Tipu’s Tiger
Tipu’s (or Tippoo’s) Tiger is a life-sized wooden mechanical organ made around 1793, depicting a tiger mauling a man in European clothing. When the crank is turned, a hidden mechanism causes the man’s arm to goes up and down, and plays his wails of agony along the growls of the tiger. Under a flap on the tiger’s body there is also a small pipe organ, which can play 18 notes.
Categories: Curiosities, history, Museums • Tags: animal, art, automaton, colonialism, figurine, grotesque, history, india, music, sculpture, tiger
Andrea Galvani: Horse balloons and fog bunnies
Categories: Contemporary Art • Tags: animal, art, balloon, horse, images, photography, rant, surreal, unsettling
Children not looking at modern art
Categories: Contemporary Art, history, Ideas, Museums • Tags: art, children, humor, imagination, museum, photography
Opulent taxidermy made by Idiots
The Idiots are an artistic collective made up of Afke Golsteijn and Floris Bakker. They describe their work as “characterized by the use of animal material exquisitely sculpted into natural positions and combined seamlessly with rich materials such as embroidery and pearls.” Their work plays with all sorts of quirky taxidermy, such as the exposed fox spine of Thanatos and Hypnos (2011), the parrot headphones of Head Phones (Stilte!) (2009), or the slick oil drop bird in Oilbird (2008). However, I […]
Categories: Contemporary Art, Curiosities • Tags: animal, art, bird, curiosities, jewels, lion, sculpture, taxidermy, unsettling
Morbid kidswear ads
If you haven’t already seen it, I strongly suggest you read about the fascinating Hidden Mothers phenomena in Victorian photography, and its possible relationship to the tradition of post-mortem photography. Amsterdam-based fashion photographers/artists Anuschka Blommers and Niels Schumm have put a morbid contemporary twist on the history of this imagery, recycling the aesthetic conventions of hidden mother and post-mortem photography into a commercial kid’s wear fashion shoot. In the first part of Blommers and Schumm’s ‘Kidswear’ series, an anonymous figure […]
Categories: Contemporary Art, history • Tags: art, body, children, face, hidden mothers, photography, unsettling, victorian era
Mostricciatoli: The little monsters of Tila Rodríguez-Past
Categories: Contemporary Art, Curiosities • Tags: art, imagination, insect, installation, monastery, monsters, sculpture
The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things 