Notes

Marilyn Manson Pillows at Design District
After years as a lightning rod for controversy, shock rock icon Marilyn Manson has swapped the microphone for a paintbrush. He's strutting his goth vibe into the art world with a jarring exhibit at Design District's 101 Exhibit space.

The gloomy artist offers nearly 30 medium and large-scale watercolor paintings that riff on the cult of celebrity, mutilation, dementia, and homicide. His abrasive, edgy paintings range from a decapitated three-headed Jesus Christ dripping blood on an antique embalmer's table to a portrait of JonBenet Ramsey as Sleeping Beauty that portrays the girl as a happy princess rather than the victim of a cold-blooded murder.

While the artworks are uneven, there are several good ones to be found in this exhibition. One of them, aptly titled Masquerade, depicts a man wearing a gas mask that might be an apt metaphor for how spectators might react to Manson's artistic overtures.

Another work, Die Deutsche Kampferin, depicts a naked Hitler with limp tallywhackers and B-cup boobs clad in a mercurochrome smear that adds to the menace of the Fuhrer's ghastly gob. The smear is framed by a patch of purple and gold irises to tone down the menace.

On a nearby wall, Manson homages Elizabeth Short by painting a scene from her death in which her face is slashed from the corners of her mouth to her ears, giving her a nightmarish look. Her raven tresses prop her features up like a pillow and contrast eerily with the horrors carved into her flesh.

He also pays homage to the dead in a series of lush paintings that creep under the skin. For marilynmansonmerch , Elizabeth Short as Snow White (A Smile II) shows the slain victim as a closeup of her face, with her blood-stained pearlies peeking through her destroyed lips. Her raven tresses give the harrowing scene a romantic tinge, but the picture's grotesque hues expose the horrors inflicted on her body.

Aside from the opulent portraits, Manson's other work is also worth checking out. His grizzled absinthe-drinking crone, When I Get Old, is painted in moss greens and sickly purples, with his back bent like a bobby pin from the apparitions and grotesques that crowd his mind. The megacephalic tyke next to the rotting infant in Ready or Not Tot gets a fright-night shellacking too, with droopy eyes and putrefying flesh. The savage act of butchering Short is also rendered with eerie detail, including her pearlies, which are inset into a frame that ensconces her twisted torso.
Here's my website: https://www.marilynmansonmerch.com/