200 Euro Series

Designing and painting boxes links a metric design to a pictorial composition, but it doesn’t really sell. Often people only want to see nice images produced by an artist. I needed a series that makes money. John Baldessari, in his work Tips for Artists who Want to Sell, gave me the elements I needed to create these paintings on canvas. Les animaux de la ferme (‘Farm Animals’) by Broodthaers gives new meaning to Ellsworth Kelly’s hard-edged paintings from the 1960s – as meadows for bulls. Broodthaers makes the distinction in quality between different bull breeds clear by associating them with car brands. I took only the muscular bulls and linked them exclusively to luxury car brands. People like to buy attractive images by artists that they can associate with the nicely packaged amount of horsepower which they may or may not own. — Henri B Defauw, 2020