Frank Ocean's easter-egg filled album announcement broke this morning. In the background was a poster of a frog, a print of Bjarne Melgaard's After Shelley Duvall '72 (Frogs on the High Line). Around this time last year, the Norwegian artist took over our art-project space at the back of Dazed Spring Summer 2014 issue. Here, we're publishing it online for the first time. Click through to see Pityfuck in all its glory.
Bjarne Melgaard is more carnivorous than simply carnal. The Norwegian’s sculptures, paintings, installations, videos, books, and mixed-media artworks are marked by the conspicuous consumption and ejaculation of graphic and gratuitous homoeroticism. But a malevolence lurks beneath the gleaming sex and trashedout consumer excess. The chaotic jubilance of his nonstop practice (he’s mounted eight solo or group exhibitions in the past two years alone) springs from a chasm of rage, an abject intimacy with the lows of human nature.
Suicide, incest, rape, selfimmolation, drug addiction and annihilation are repeat themes, but often rendered in crystallised, candycoloured, childlike forms. For our spring/summer 2014 art residency, Melgaard created an editorial the likes of which has never been seen before in the magazine medium. “It’s about how communication traps us in devices of information that we cannot digest,” he says. Inspired by websites like Spacedicks and artefacts mined from the deep web, Melgaard juxtaposes images of what he calls “dinofucking” with renderings of his new streetwear collection. Like much of his work, it comes with a dose of nihilism. “It’s for people like me who hate street culture,” he says.
