The cowgirl is fully at home and in her candyland habitat. Armed with a gun and candy heart bludgeon she answers to no one, nor any system of subjugating moral code imposed upon her.
Will Cotton
Limited edition of 20077.0 (H) × 53.7 (W) cm
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The Cowgirl takes us on a ride across vanilla ice cream shores.
In Will Cotton’s candyland, desire and excess reign supreme. Our first print collaboration, The Cowgirl, is taken from a series of oil paintings that introduced a new cast of characters to the landscape. The titular cowgirl looks like a 50s pin-up star with her bedazzled costume, Old Hollywood waves, and million-dollar smile. She finds natural kinship with the elusive unicorn – both are "untamable, all-powerful creatures, desired by all."
Will’s impossible fantasies are rendered in realistic detail – like the muscle definition of the mythical creature in full gallop. His balance of traditional painting techniques and post-modern garishness is faithfully recreated using archival pigments. In line with the ‘more is more’ logic of Will’s land of desire, the print is finished with two silkscreen glitter layers on the cowgirl’s pistol and candy heart.
Will Cotton 1 collaborationIn medieval folklore, Cockaigne is a mythical land with rivers of wine, houses made of cake, eternal youth, and endless sex. Will Cotton’s multidisciplinary practice reimagines this vision of hedonistic excess for the modern cultural landscape – “a candy land that feeds an insatiable appetite.” Taking cues from rococo artists like Fragonard and Boucher, his oil-painted fantasies are rendered in exquisite detail. The cotton-candy clouds and languorous bodies are finished so smoothly that, at first glance, they look super-realistic. This illusion of perfection is undercut by a feeling of unease. In reality, the nausea from all the sugar and the vertigo from the lack of solid ground would make this paradise inhospitable. For Will, this is the paradox of fantasy – “living in one’s own utopia can quickly become a dystopian nightmare.”
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