Diabolically grotesque art – from Jonathan Payne's sprouting finger sculptures right back to Hieronymus Bosch – has staying power because our lives have not radically changed. As long as we have bodies, we will experience body horror
Warts, growths and misplaced body parts abound in the bizarre sculptures of Jonathan Payne. A tongue with teeth, a mass of flesh sprouting fingers, an eyeball in its own little flesh sac … Don't tell me you're not a bit shocked or repelled or amazed. Horror never really gets old. It's tired to say this kind of art is tired.
The grotesque has staying power because our life as beings of flesh and blood has not changed, and so long as we have bodies, we can experience body horror. This applies across art, cinema and literature. What we mean by the "grotesque" in art goes back to the medieval imagination. In the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, the hideous monster Grendel murders sleeping warriors in the king's mead hall. In medieval art, such evil creatures abound. They reach a diabolical grandeur of imagination in north European art in the 15th and 16th centuries. We still stare transfixed at the grotesque art of Bosch, Bruegel and Grunewald.
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