Beck is doing some promo for Devandra Banhart’s art, which is being featured in the Colorspace section, a visual art gallery on Beck’s website.
I kind of knew Banhart was drawing his CDs/LP’s covers, but I had no idea he had accomplished so much as a visual artist: His work was presented at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) in the show Abstract Rhythms, alongside the work of Abstract painter Paul Klee.
Banhart’s work was also shown at Emilio Mazzoli Gallery D’Arte Contemporary in Modena in Italy and the Deitch Projects Exhibit at the Art Basel Festival in Miami in 2006. He had his first solo exhibit at Andrew Roth Gallery in New York, then at San Francisco’s Jack Hanley Gallery, the Atelier Cardenas Bellanger in Paris, then shows at Oslo’s Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, NYC’s Daniel Reich and Canada galleries… Wow, is he still making music? Actually, many of his drawings were made along his 5th album ‘Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon’.
His work makes me think about Aboriginal art, with weird, flat, uni-dimensional monkey-creatures with elongated breasts and decorated with a lot of symmetrical and repetitive elements. There are also a lot of these bearded sombrero-men with snakes and plenty of these disturbing blood-injected-bursting-capillaries eyes,.. creepy!
The drawings are protected on the website, so you have to go there to look at them