Notes

Marilyn Manson Pillows at Design District
Marilyn Manson, the shock rock legend has given up his microphone in favor of a paintbrush after years as a controversial lightning rod. The jarring exhibit he has created at Design District's 101 Exhibit area shows his gothic style.

The dark artist presents nearly 30 large- and medium-sized watercolor paintings. His work riffs on celebrity culture, mutilation, dementia, homicide, and other cults. His abrasive and hard-hitting paintings range in style from a threeheaded Jesus Christ, bleeding on an antique embalmer’s board to a JonBenet Ramsey portrait depicting Sleeping Beauty. The girl is portrayed as a happy princess instead of being the victim of cold blooded murder.

Even though the artworks aren't perfect, there are some good ones. One of the paintings, appropriately titled Masquerade shows a man wearing gas masks that may be a metaphor for how people might react to Manson’s artistic gestures.

Another painting, Die Deutsche Kampferin portrays a naked Hitler dressed in a mercurochrome-smear. To tone down the threat, the smear has a border of purple and golden irises.

Manson has painted a scene from Elizabeth Short's funeral on a nearby mural. In it, her face is slashed at the corners and her ears. marilynmansonmerch support her features like a pillow and contrast horribly with the horrors carved into flesh.

In a series lush paintings that crawl under the skin, he also pays tribute to the dead. Elizabeth Short, as Snow White in A Smile II, shows the victim's face with her blood stained pearlies peeking through her cracked lips. Her raven hair gives the scene a romantic edge, but her horrendous body is exposed by the picture's grotesque colors.

Manson's other artwork is worth looking at, in addition to the lavish portraits. His elderly, absinthe-drinking, crone, When You Get Old is painted with moss greens, sickly purples, and his back bent like a pin from the apparitions. The megacephalic tyke that is right next to Ready or Not Tot, gets a frightening-night shellacking as well, with droopy eyelids and fleshy 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/