BadgerJeff

About the Artist

My paintings teem with grotesque, absurd monsters that bound through the impossible worlds of cartoons, science fiction and video games. Through intense color, scrawled line and palimpsestuous surfaces, my work evokes and intertwines unexpected narrative elements from popular culture. The constantly morphing cast of characters is akin to the dark allegories of Carroll Dunham and Philip Guston and the brutish hordes of Bosch and Bruegel. They can be hopeful, single-minded, abrasive, stoic, pensive, manic, ecstatic and scared as they fight, eat, pine for love and cheat ? just like us. Their interactions imply relationships but confound identification.

By painting iconic figures who act out miniature dramas of human struggle, I hope to present an opportunity to look humorously at our own actions from afar. This work depicts a world of never-ending exigency, where there is found both hope and doom.
Jeff Badger is a Portland-based painter and installation artist who shows his work nationally, including recent group shows at MPG Contemporary and Samson Projects in Boston and solo shows at Hay Gallery in Portland and The Essex Art Center in Lawrence, Mass. For more info, visit badgerart.com.