Ian Kirkpatrick - American Gothic

2.2 x 2.2 meters

Hand painted layered over 4 canvases

2024

The New York Public Library describes Gothic Horror as "the battle between humanity and unnatural forces of evil (sometimes man-made, sometimes supernatural) within an oppressive, inescapable, and bleak landscape". In American Gothic the landscape is a classic "haunted house" - with iconography from 1920s cartoons, tarot cards, Elizabethan woodcuts, video games and modern news footage - as well as historical paintings by Fransisco Goya (The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters), Gustav Klimt (Death and Life), and Henri Fuseli (The Nightmare). The artwork playfully explores Western anxiety in the age of declining global power - a downfall accelerated by environmental destruction, fake news, waning democracy, plague, war and insurrection.