Artist Anthony Lister uses spray paint and channels street art to explore the imagery associated with heroes and villains. The results include a gender-bending Robin, a crucified Captain America, and Batmen and Wonder Women of unusual shapes and sizes.
Lister is known in the Low Brow art movement for both his paintings and his installations, which often examine pop culture and how a generation raised on American television processes and interprets the symbols and imagery we are shown. He was inspired to paint series of superheroes and supervillains by looking at illegal street art, noting that street artists are as anonymous as masked crusaders — known only by the work they did on the streets. With that in mind, he uses spray paint as the base colors in his mixed-media paintings, and often paints them in mirror images to demonstrate the deliberateness of his seemingly haphazard strokes. Lister insists that the paintings have no overarching message or sociological comment; he simply sees superheroes and villains as the classical gods and goddesses of our modern society, and likes to toy with the symbols and characters so many of us have grown up with.
[Anthony Lister via mashKULTURE]
