10th Anniversary Artist’s Print Portfolio

Monster Chetwynd
Bat Opera (Heavy Metal) 2019

Edition of 50
Print portfolio of 8 prints, each 26 x 34 cm
Special Price: £1500

Monster Chetwynd’s Bat Opera (Heavy Metal) Print Portfolio presents eight new images adapted from her ongoing Bat Opera series of paintings. This is a rare chance to own a substantial artwork by the Turner Prize nominated artist at a special price as a fundraiser for Eastside Projects.

Combining the delicate, sensitive paintings of what the artist describes as ‘unworthy subject matter’ with the graphic approach of Heavy Metal imagery, Chetwynd’s bats link her story telling and performative processes with the metal genre’s use of heavy distortion and dark depressing subject matter. The artist sees her bats as anti-heroes, channelling Heavy Metal’s working class expression of industrial control through the occult threatening of traditional values, set against the backdrop of her new exhibition Hell Mouth 3 and Home of Metal’s celebration of Black Sabbath’s 50th Anniversary and the legacies of Heavy Metal.

The eight prints are silk screened in 3 colours on mirrored silver polychrome card and are presented in a black portfolio box with signed and numbered sticker in an edition of 50.

Along with the Metal influences and legends, such as Ozzy Osbourne’s infamous biting the head off a bat on stage in the early 1980s, Chetwynd’s series of beautiful miniature paintings depict different species of bats in varying settings and groupings and are inspired by the miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard, Constable’s cloud studies, and zoological staged photography.

Chetwynd explains her fascination with bats: “They pollinate at night, they have radar, they are mammals with wings and, of course, they have the stigma of evil. They are perfect as unworthy subject matter. Early on I had a quick recognition that I could use them as comic anti-heroes. That classic tension in painting between repulsion and attraction… Within painting discourse this can be dubbed simplistic, but for me, this makes them great subject matter — intriguing, repulsive, yet anthropomorphic qualities and, again, a history of being associated with evil.”

To order one of the editions email annabel@eastsideprojects.org with your name and address.
Instalment plans are possible if required.