I used to really love the work of the Clayton brothers which I kept up with in Blab. But lately I haven’t seen much of their work around so I decided to check out their website where I discovered I had missed a lot the past couple of years. I noticed they had a major show in Beijing at the F2 gallery and a new book of a limited edition of 1000 had come out to accompany the show (so immediately my mouse goes to the buy button). The hardcover book is in both Chinese and English and is a collection of the paintings from that show Patient. Most of the work seems to be images of just that- hospital patients- but it takes a while to notice. That’s because the images are completely insanely filled with bursting colorful grotesque imagery. In Often to Relieve, a boy is about to take some Pepto Bismol from a spoon- and you will probably notice that after you notice that half the skin on his face is not there showing the muscle, there are beams of color shooting out of one of his eyes and a weird bubbly pattern over the other. Not to mention his blue and green wispy hair is flowing over all this. Other paintings show amputated body parts with colorful veins seeping out, patterned organs falling out of a hairy stomach and ugly nurses with enormous needles. Pill boxes, bandages, bones, oxygen tanks and IV bags can all be hidden in the paintings too. Basically this is what you imagine a hospital to look like in your childhood nightmares. But my adult self loves to look through these pages both getting grossed out and marveling at the variety or mark making, texture and creative collaging of imagery these guys do. Get a signed copy of this book here.

© Julia Rothman 2007