Rob Birza

Rob Birza is a stylistic anarchist, who never rules out anything in advance or allows a single technique to escape his consideration. He produces paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations, stage sets and ceramic objects. Though not weaned from an occasional hint of sentiment , his work is characterized by irony and relativism. Birza takes pleasure in toying subversively with painterly values and norms, while paying little heed to the rules established by modernist art and, from Holbein to Warhol, he gave the history of art a thorough shuffling. This painting is part of a series of paintings and drawings based on `horror strips' and all sorts of freaks and monsters. Within that realm of art, the depicted monsters lose their blood-ties with comic strips, animation films and computer games and become linked instead with the fantastic tradition of artists such as Jeroen Bosch, Pieter Breughel and, more recently, James Ensor.