Bambi & Thumper

2023
18 color Hand-Pulled Silk-Screened Serigraph Print on Thick fine art cotton rag paper
Edition of 200 copies plus proofs. Numbered and signed by Shag
3.50 x 100 cm

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Description

Inspirada por las películas de la era dorada de James Bond en los años sesenta y su estética, Josh Agle te ofrece esta serigrafía de nada menos que 18 tintas con Sean Connery de secundario eclipsado por las bellas y letales sicarias Bambi y Thumper. La tensión se palpa en el ambiente, y todo indica que lo que se avecina no es una escena romántica sino una lucha sin cuartel en un ring de excepción: la Casa Elrod del arquitecto John Lautner, icono de la arquitectura de los años 60. Esta serigrafía inmortaliza los segundos anteriores a la famosa secuencia de la pelea entre 007 y las dos esbirras, malas malísimas, en la palícula de 1971 “Diamonds Are Forever” (en España “Diamantes para la eternidad”). Hará las delicias de los seguidores de Shag y en especial de los más cinéfilos. El propio Shag nos revela su inspiración para esta nueva serigrafía: “La primera vez que ví la película Diamonds are Forever fue siendo niño, y la escena en la que las dos bellas guardaespaldas pegan una paliza a James Bond en una casa futurística me causó una larga impresión. Muchos años después tuve ocasión de visitar esa super guarida de villanos, la Casa Elrod en Palm Springs, y puse la banda sonora de la película a todo trapo. Presioné un botón y una pared gigante curvada de cristal se deslizó y ocultó por uno de los laterales, y de repente me encontré de pie al borde de la misma piscina adonde Bambi y Thumper habían arrojado a James Bond. ¿Cómo crees que esto no iba a inspirar un cuadro?”

shag

SHAG, Josh Agle (Sierra Madre, California, 1962)     

American artist Josh Agle is better known as Shag (an acronym made by combining the last two letters of his first name and the first two of his surname).

Agle studied architecture in the 1980s but later switched to graphic design, becoming a successful commercial illustrator for clients like Time and Forbes and designing album covers for several California bands, including his own. In 1995, Otto von Stroheim—editor of Tiki News and organiser of the Tiki Oasis festival—invited him to contribute a work to a group show in Santa Monica, where it caught the attention of Billy Shire, a collector and owner of La Luz de Jesus Gallery. He participated in a collective exhibition there in 1996, and his artistic career took off. According to Shire, Shag “created what could be called a whole new genre: twenty-first century hipster cool”. He soon became a cult figure and leading exponent of the Lowbrow movement, and over the years he has become a successful artist whose work is collected by Ben Stiller, Whoopi Goldberg and many other Hollywood celebrities and exhibited in the finest galleries of New York, Los Angeles and Sydney.

His prolific work as a commercial illustrator includes a series of paintings commissioned by Disney to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Disney World.

Shag’s art features scenes tinged with irony and mischievous humour, rendered in a distinctive style inspired by the commercial illustrations of the 1950s and 60s. His paintings, with their vivid colours and kitsch aesthetic, are an ode to consumerism and the good life; his characters drink, smoke and eat in stylish, sophisticated settings, in houses designed by Richard Neutra or John Lautner and furnished by Eames, Eero Saarinen, Arne Jacobson and George Nelson.

Shag also finds aesthetic and artistic inspiration in early James Bond films, David Bailey’s photographs of “Swinging London” and the work of artists like Robert Williams (founder of Juxtapoz magazine), Keith Haring and Mark Ryden, whom he greatly admires.