Time: Tattoo art today

Intriguing exhibition at Somerset House which had commissioned various well known tattoo artists to produce a work on the subject of time, a classic tattoo motif, on any medium except skin.

I must admit I’d avoided this show as I wasn’t sure what it was about but I was at Somerset House with time to kill and it was free so I thought why not and in fact I quite enjoyed it!

On the whole the work was a cartoon like with overly coloured images and a lot of mysticism however there were also some stunning works. I loved Ichiboy’s “Where is the shop?” which is the attached photo. It’s a take on a Japanese painting but the main image is as on an iPad and the protagonist is using his phone. There was a stunning double portrait by Shawn Barber called of a man being tattooed. It’s sense of time came from the fact that multiple positions of the protagonists were shown in the one picture. Your eye made it one image and yet when you looked again the man had two heads and there were four versions of the tattooist. A stunning picture worthy of the BP Portrait Awards.

It was a fascinating exercise in giving a group of artists from a particular genre a topic and seeing what happens!

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