Infernal visions of Paradise, outrageous and burlesque sexuality, martyrized bodies, medieval imagery... One says of it that she would paint dicks as anyone else would paint bunches of flowers. Here is Anne Van der Linden's marvelously chaotic universe.

Anne Van der Linden was born in 1959 in Bromley in England from a Polish Jewish mother and a Belgian father. Raised in a violent climate, she has quickly created a fantastic imaginary full of marvelous and sexual monsters. She made her first erotic work at the age of 15 : an embroidery representing a female creature with a tentacular sex. As a teenage girl in the 70's, she met one of the most important person in her artistic life as the future musician and performer Jean-Louis Costes. She became her partner until the end of the 80's and both have traveled in the whole world for about ten years : Colombia, Tanzania, East Africa partly crossed by foot...
In 1984 they created together the colorful artistic magazine "La vache bigarrée" ("The multocoloured cow"). Plenty of texts and slobbery colors, dirty and weird illustrations, the alchemy between Van der Linden and Costes operates with wonder. Then she took part with him in his first opera "Youkis", a puppet show written by June Shenfield, then made for him many fantastic decorations for his shows and some album ans film covers ("Les Oxyures", "Le fils de Caligula", "Livrez les blanches aux bicots", "Drôle de trip", ...) and collaborated in some of his porno-social operas and films ("Nana", Aux chiottes", Sans queue ni tête", "Le fils de Caligula", "Morpho", "Eclipse"...).

She settled in 1988 in Saint-Denis and met there the Australian artists Ken Sheperd, seen in "Le fils de Caligula" by Costes as a hysterical prophet, and June Shenfield, recently dead poet, managers of the local gallery-bookshop Cannibal Pierce in which she made her first exposures in 1992.

Anne van der Linden makes squirt on her paintings her phantasms, dreams or nightmares, or quite simply her outrageous perception, ever stripped of humour, of the real world. In her world ironing and washing up become middle-aged tortures ; she makes birthday parties scatologic and family dinners cannibal. A girl masturbates in her room in front of the dead glances of her decapitated lovers. Other gentle young ladies brush their silky beard in a friendly way. A couple of dead and rotten lovers goes to bed. The everyday life of her characters is by no means disturbed by the surrealist interventions of demonic hermaphrodites or delirious instruments of torture. In Anne van der Linden 's fairy tales stands a crying Cinderella used as armchair by her cruel half-sisters and in her pornographic vision of the religion you may meet some cute gargoyles-children licking the wonderful God huge penis . Van der Linden's style is recognizable between all : a feature pointing out medieval engravings, grotesque and fantastic sexuality, wide-open or tentacular sexes, flashy colors, characters with a peaceful face, even facing up with atrocities and painful situations.

She exposes regularly in France and abroad her apocalyptic and sensual paintings and publishes her works in many books with evocative title such as "Heavy Meat", "Satan m'habite" ("Satan lives inside myself", but the French title is a pun meaning "I got an erection") or in the misanthropic magazine "Ton cul pue" ("Your ass stinks").

Anne van der Linden likes to vary the supports of expression ; she has made some incredible and crual short films as true prolongations of her painter work : "Intestins Fragiles" ("Fragile Intestines") in which an inaccurate and sick husband sees himself abused by his two mistresses, "Ironing" where a young cleaning lady receives a severe punishment of her evil owner, or "La citerne" ("the cistern"), a tragi-comic fiction in which two famished children, living in the precariousness of their alcoholic mother, end up devouring her.

So please, tear off one of your eyes and nimbly throw it on her divine site, it's worth it for sure : http://heavyshop.free.fr/

Dellamorte

april 2007





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