I’ve always been fascinated by obsession. Why do we become obsessed with people we’ve never met? Why do certain faces hold us in their spell long after they’re gone?
POPCULT! explores our almost cult-like adoration of the icons of popular culture — figures whose image, influence and mythology have become bigger than the people themselves.
Marilyn Monroe. Audrey Hepburn. Alan Turing. Faces we know intimately, even when we know surprisingly little about the person behind them. I’d never even seen an Audrey Hepburn film when I painted her.
Each portrait turns that relationship back on us. The icons stare out with the same hypnotic, heart-eyed gaze with which we, the devoted, look upon them.
Bright, seductive and deliberately excessive, POPCULT! is ultimately less interested in the celebrity than in us — and our enduring obsession with fame, image and iconography.