Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Spartacus Chetwynd

Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, born Alalia Chetwynd, is better known as Spartacus Chetwynd. She was born in London in 1973, where she still lives and works today. A few years ago, in an interview with the international art magazine "Flash Art," she stated: "Ideas come to me ‘unexpectedly,’ like William Blake. If an idea excites me, I try to implement it in the most logical way possible. It’s not something that is meditated upon or calculated; it’s more of an overexcited enthusiasm. After the initial flash of inspiration, I make drawings and plans, and I discuss them with my crew. It seems that I work on the idea of rehabilitation or translation, something completely out of fashion today, of no interest to the current trends, yet I believe it’s worth singing and dancing about. Meatloaf, George Stubbs, or Yves Klein are some examples. The more I research, the more I think there is so much fantastic material here; why don’t people appreciate them more? It’s a bit of a case of love for the underdog."

The painting series "Bat Opera," initiated in 2004, consists of five pocket-sized paintings that explicitly reference the precious miniatures of the 16th century. "I found a fantastic book in the zoology section of the library at University College London, featuring wonderful portraits of bats. The photographer had mounted these images on turquoise backgrounds, which entirely recall Holbein. I wonder if that was intentional. They strangely resemble the paintings of a 17th-century miniaturist or the distorted faces in Francis Bacon’s paintings of the Pope. The bats look like authoritative men in pomp, slightly deformed yet bulbous and haughty. When I saw these images, for a moment I thought I could use them as anti-heroic comics. The classic tension in painting between repulsion and attraction... From a pictorial standpoint, it may seem simplistic, but in my case, it makes them perfect painting subjects, with intriguing, repellent characteristics, yet anthropomorphic and tied to a narrative of evil. Thus, in that work, it was these zoological photographs that set everything in motion. I knew they would be good painting subjects because the photographer had already made the leap."