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Magnus Gjoen Mixes Beauty and War in “I’ll Cry When I’m Done Killing”

Magnus Gjoen’s digital works make us look twice to grasp their meaning. He wants us to see in a different light, being it weapons, animals or the human race itself. Gjoen's unique style of juxtaposing themes of religion, war, beauty, and destruction in his art, featured on our blog here, bring us to also question their correlation.

Magnus Gjoen’s digital works make us look twice to grasp their meaning. He wants us to see in a different light, being it weapons, animals or the human race itself. Gjoen’s unique style of juxtaposing themes of religion, war, beauty, and destruction in his art, featured on our blog here, bring us to also question their correlation.

Gjoen continues to examine how to change peoples relationship and preconceived notions of objects in “I’ll cry when I’m done killing”, currently on view at Galleri GEO in Norway. The titular piece depicts the image of a beautiful, yet disturbing 17th century styled girl shown crying. In other works, flowers are used a symbol of delicacy and weapons as brutality, but when mixed, they offer contradicting definitions of beauty and power.

Gjoen explains that the inspiration for these works in particular came from a grayscale mural with gold leaf that he had seen in Italy: “There was something beautiful in the way that although this was done in the 17th century, it seemed explicitly modern in the way that there was no color apart from the gold.” “I’ll cry when I’m done killing” will be on view until May 1st.

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