MADBUNNY's exhibition "ART OF GETTING OVER" was held as an opening project of chignitta space. It was a grand installation of MADBUNNY's works, various gadgets that are his roots, and his entire studio. We asked him to explain his works and each of the items at the venue. Madbunny's artworks will be available for sale online at chignitta. Please wait for a while.
MADBUNNY – SOLO EXHIBITION – 『ART OF GETTING OVER』
Date] June 25 (Friday) - July 4 (Sunday), 2021
Venue] chignitta space
The story leading up to the exhibition at chigntitta is also an important part of the show.
Please check out his Facebook page.
FRUITS BASKET
This is my homage to pop art. I often use skulls as a motif, so I added some cute fruits to it. I think the stripes and dots are graphically effective. You can specify the colors for this piece. I also sprinkled more sequins than usual.
HIGH-BRID VACCINE FACTORY
This piece was completed about a day before the show in Kamakura. It is an injection and needle from East Germany. It is an old one. The bottle itself can be bought at medical supply stores, and I put a sticker saying HIGH-BRID on it and injected lame and jelly into it. It was a time when people were talking about the shortage of vaccines, so I thought I'd twist that into a work of art. I bought the syringe at a local market five or six years ago, and I thought it was time to use it. In Berlin, syringes can be found on the street, so they are very familiar.
The End of Overdoze Holic
I have been making this motif for about 15 years now. I've been using the same silkscreen plates for a long time, but when the earthquake hit in 2011, my office was shaken and collapsed, and the plates broke. I fixed them with tape and used them as they were.I must have done about 20 prints.
Nowadays, the most popular order is for the customer to decide the color of the flowers and for me to make them. I use stencils for the flower colors. (I found a long-legged spider perched on a painting.) It's always like that. This was the case at Fuji Rock, too, where colorful pictures attract a lot of insects. Butterflies and dragonflies perch on my paintings at Fuji Rock, too. I don't know if they look like flowers or what.
HONEY TRAP
This is a silkscreen print on real money, just like a honey trap. Since this is the brand concept of BYSDNTCRY, there are many sexy motifs in my works. This sexual image is also connected to the "life and death" image I express. T-shirts with this pattern are also available.
MAYHEM
This is the most problematic work this time. I've been asked a lot, "Why are there so many different touches? This is my son May's work. The drawing, the spray, everything. I think he probably spent several days on it. We have a lot of tools in the studio. I think he wants to help dad with his work.I gave him gesso on a canvas and told him he could paint whatever he wanted. He's still painting some of them now. lol. It's like he has a mood.I wonder if he's thinking, "I'm going to continue this one today. He's very focused when he's drawing. It's okay to be quiet. lol.
MADBUNNY
This bunny icon was first created in London in 2005 and shown at my first solo exhibition. I didn't give it the name "MADBUNNY" either. When I had my first solo exhibition in London, I took Polaroids of all the people who came to the gallery. I took Polaroids of everyone who came and asked them to write something. I didn't think I'd be able to have my own art show in London, so I wanted to leave something to commemorate the occasion, and some people wrote "Hello MADBUNNY! ” I thought it was interesting, so I decided to use "MADBUNNY" as my name.The owner of another famous gallery came to the gallery and offered me to do MADBUNNY at his place next year, which led to the present. And here is the first print. It was a stencil. The skull in the middle must have disappeared. LOL. I used the scanned version as a template, and didn't modify the logo at all from the beginning. So you had a finished product for your debut work. I didn't have much time before the show, so I made this logo at the last minute.
MADBUNNY
I wonder how many tens of thousands of stickers I've given out so far. lol. I wouldn't be where I am today if it wasn't for this bunny. The first time I did this was at an art gallery, and then I started my own apparel brand (UG). It was a very hardcore brand in the world of skateboarding and snowboarding, so at first the people at the store said to me, "What kind of cute stuff is this? So I decided to create a separate brand, BYSDNTCRY, in addition to UG. Now, I can't sell anything without it. Laughs.
On the day of the show (2005), there was a terrorist attack in London, so my gallery was in the police line, and I couldn't even go to the gallery. The gallery became like a BBC base, and one of the terrorists was caught near the gallery. They were holed up. When I went to the gallery in the morning, they said, "You can't enter. I have such memories.
R18+ MOSAIC
In this age of COVID and distance, I deliberately made the bunny a mosaic, so that it would be visible from a distance. When you get close, the image is digitally blurred, but when you get farther away, it's just right. The message is to get that far away.
LIKE A VIRGIN
It's a very typical "BYSDNTCRY" world. The title is ironically reversed, with a young-looking bunny wearing strawberries and an invitation, but with a blindfold. This is also a work that I can't make anymore because the plates were destroyed during the earthquake, so I have to make them again. I had to make a new printing plate to make this work.
DEAD CHAPLIN
This is a set of two, one of which I'm struggling with, and one of which is this. One of them is this one.The message is that comedians are suffering too.
BUNNY FEVER
BUNNY FEVER" has become an iconic symbol of Fuji Rock.
There is a long path through the forest that leads from the entrance to the huge festival site called "Boardwalk", so we have to make enough to cover the entire path and the bunny garden around the stage at the far end. Last year, since there was no Fuji Rock, we had a SMASH UK warehouse in Naeba, and these bunnies were in the warehouse, but when I heard that the warehouse had been flooded, I thought, "Oh no! I went to check on them and found that most of them were moldy and rotten. These ones were on the top of the pile, so I rescued them. LOL. So I have to make about 200 more new bunnies to add to this. This year it will be in August. But the UK team can't come, so it's going to be a lonely job.
It's lemonade. It has the highest caffeine content in the world. In Berlin, everyone drinks it during the day at clubs. It's really bad. What does "coffee lemonade" taste like?
It's like what "coffee lemonade" tastes like. You can't drink it in Japan because of the caffeine problam. This is also called "Club Mate," which is yerba mate tea. The Germans drink beer in clubs, but they also drink this lemonade with a shot of vodka. They sell vodka in little bottles. In Berlin, the club parties go on for 74 hours straight. There's no one drinking Coke, everyone is either drinking this or beer. It's delicious. Laughter. I also set up an art show in Berlin while drinking beer, and when I get tired of beer, I drink this one. If I like it, I drink it every day. My neighbors say to me, "Aki, you'll die if you drink that much every day. Laughter.
It's a peanut can. You open the back and put the peanuts in, that's all, but it's cute. That penguin makes tea. You put a tea bag in the slot of his beak and drop it in the cup. When the time is up, it rises to the top. If you use the wrong kind of teacup, it will all spill out. LOL.
There are many kinds of German beer, but as you know, I drink it every day. This is a pilsner, easy to drink, and I like it. It's called "Bell Liner Kindle," and there's a child in the logo. I thought it was cute. At first I thought it might be juice, but then I wondered why it was beer with this logo. Laughs. I also collected the beer mugs with advertisements on them, and I would give them out at stores as commemorative gifts.
This is a vintage Leica case. The tripod is a Czech one. I like the mechanical look. It looks like a vintage Triumph.
The big black one is a Karmann Ghia muffler, EMPI is a third party company for Karmann Ghia and Volkswagen, and it came with my Karmann Ghia when I bought it. This is also the character of a very famous German bank (Dresdner Bank), designed by a famous designer (Luigi Colani). The one below is a Berlin license plate.
This is a character from Fuji Rock called "Gonchan". Gordon came to Japan about 10 days ago and started picking up rocks from the river, drying them, painting them, drawing faces on them, and then putting them back in the river. There are hundreds of them in the river, some are tiny, some are too big to carry.
The artists at SMASH UK are all very interesting. They are all free, so there is no such thing as "like something", and there is WIM.
This is my cat, "Me". She was a stray cat, but her mom and dad lived in our yard, and they thought her newborn was very cute. I was raising her.
One day, she was limping on his hind legs, and I felt sorry for her, so I took her in and took her to the hospital, but she got sick and died a few months after she was born. died on my chest.
Her blue eyes and dark circles around her eyes are super cute. It's like death metal. LOL. Her mom is all black with yellow eyes, "Cats. and dad was white and this baby was born.
It's an amplifier. It's called "Orange". It's made in England. It's not like a Marshall or anything like that. The bass amps I use for gigs are bigger professional ones, but this one has 500 watts. This amp and a cabinet are all you need for a live show in a small venue.
This is a mug from "SLAM CITY SKATES" and "ROUGH TRADE". This is the same store, the first store had a skateboard store on the first floor and ROUGH TRADE in the basement. It was run by two friends of mine. Both companies got bigger, and we each moved out, so the stores are no longer there. It was cool. It was like London. It was in Covent Garden. At that time, there were stores in Covent Garden and Notting Hill. Now ROUGH TRADE has a huge store on Brick Lane.
This is a vintage "Flamus" bass. Warwick is a famous high-powered bass manufacturer now, and this is the original company. The father of the current president started the company, and it became Warwick. It's a very slender bass, and it's a vintage bass that you can find in a music museum in Germany. I sometimes make sounds on it. It's short, the neck is thin, it's light, and the Stones' Bill Wyman model came from here. At the time, Bill Wyman was playing Flamus. It was cute. And the pickups move.
The vibrator is a symbol of BYSDNTCRY. It is from a German brand called "Fun Factory. In the middle of the city, there is an adult toy store with glass walls, and a husband and wife walk in hand in hand and ask, "Which one do you want? Like that. That kind of thing is normal, and people are very open about sex. I like the catchphrase "LOVE YOURSELF". Everything is cute. There are various colors like this.
WOOD CUT PORTLAITS is a book about a tattoo artist named Alex Binnie, who also makes woodcut prints, and did my tattoo. He's one of the most famous tattoo artists in the world, and he's like the best in London. WIM drew the art on my hand with magic ink, and Alex did the tattoo. He was so famous that I went to his studio for about 10 years. But I couldn't get him to carve. The masters. So I met WIM, an artist in London, and we lived together in his studio, and I said, "I want to get a tattoo there," and WIM called me and said, "He's my friend. He said, "I have a good friend in Japan who wants to get a tattoo there," and I said, Then he said, "come tomorrow!" (laughs) I wondered what my 10 years had been like. Laughter. And WIM's portrait is in there too.
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