Gory Anatomical Portraits Show Beloved Icons' Blood and Guts

For Nychos, everyday is Halloween. The Austrian street artist just finished a multi-platform public installation in New York’s Flatiron Plaza, a collaboration with the Vienna Tourism board, that featured a massive graffiti mural of Sigmund Freud being split into pieces. The Freud mural, which was on view in the plaza until June 18th, now makes its way to the Jonathan LeVine Gallery for Nychos’ follow-up show, IKON. The exhibition features a number of new portraits depicting different celebrities and fictional characters—Yoda, Marilyn Monroe, and David Hasselhoff—in Nychos' signature vibrant and glossy style.

His cartoonish subjects are portrayed with a variety of anatomic deformities. Some are depicted with translucent skin, while others are cut down the middle into halves. The artist applies these bodily discrepancies in order to juxtapose his subjects' exterior beauty against the gnarly physical appearance of anatomy.

The show includes a radiographed painting of the Statue of Liberty, an author’s portrait of Yoda sliced in two, and, of course, Barbie, whose skin is slowly melting off her bones down the right side of her body. Nychos, in other words, chooses iconic cultural personalities whose physical appearance are so engrained in our collective cultural consciousnesses that they themselves turn mythologies. Nychos looks to subvert these ideals by literally dissecting these icons, revealing that underneath all of the glitz and glamour, these larger-than-life figures are made out of the same unromantic blood and guts as everybody else.

Check out more images from the show below:

For more information about the show, head over to Jonathan LeVine gallery’s website. Check out more work by the artist on on Instagram and on his website.

Related:

Electrified Skeleton Animals Worthy of an Iron Maiden Album

Analyze This 10-Foot-Tall Sculpture of Freud's Famous Couch

Yung Jake's Emoji Portraits of Celebrities