We previously featured Australian artist Matthew Quick’s paintings of well known monuments, titled “The Accidental Empires” here on the blog. Inspired by the rise and fall of historical empires, the artist took these symbols of power and made them more personable by portraying them with everyday objects. He continues this concept with his latest series of oil paintings, “Monumental Nobodies”. Here, Quick dresses his monumental subjects in contemporary clothing and items like Mickey Mouse ears, hot pink hair curlers, and rubber kitchen gloves. The crowns of revered rulers are replaced with traffic cones, while goddesses are defaced with lipstick marks and classical nudes scroll through their iTunes, reducing them to “nobodies”. Quick makes a mockery of their original symbolism, constantly questioning their relevance. He calls it a gentle ridicule, by which he plays with their initial statements inorder to encourage us to contemplate their meaning.
Oil painter