Bo Fowler. Phantasmagoria

About

Hermit-like in his cramped cellar, Bo Fowler paints, glues, mutilates or in other ways tampers with piles of discarded toys, plastic animals and old and broken religious figures. He then arranges these objects in front of painted two dimensional landscapes, surrounds them with ornate frames and covers them in thick layers of resin to create bizarre but compelling tableaux.

Bo Fowler is the son of artists Nancy Fouts and Malcolm Fowler, has a PhD in critical and creative writing, and has been making strange assemblages in his basement since 2010. His blog - More notes from the Autopsy of God, in which he challenges well established philosophies - by presenting alternative and often witty aphorisms, has been viewed over 60,000 times and has been nominated as one of The Times websites of the week. He has a loyal Twitter following of 36,000.

His pseudo-religious pictures are heavily influenced by Dadaism and the 15th Century Netherlandish Realism school of painting, notably Hieronymus Bosch. Fowler’s ‘paintings’ are intentionally ambiguous and resonate with submerged symbolism and forgotten allegories, fluctuating between the sacred and the sacrilegious, the two and the three dimensional, the serious and the comic.

Not everything in the Universe should have an explanation.