Looking for something?

Tap outside or press close

WorkArt & Culture

David Henry Nobody Jr's wonderfully bonkers self-portraits with masks made of food and consumerist detritus

This January, a living New York legend and an awe-inspiring underground figure will present new work from his incredibly bonkers self-portraiture series.

Written By:
David Henry Nobody Jr's surreal self-portrait with a face made of orange paint wearing shelves laden with beef meatball sandwiches, burger buns and canned soup against a white background

David Henry Nobody Jr's Fake Smears and Facial Food Fiascos at the Big Apple's Contra Gallery will feature photography, video and performance.

Known for transforming himself into bizarre characters using masks and wearable sculptures comprised of food and consumerist detritus, the artist calls this practice "Resemblage", a term he coined to describe his unique conceptualisations, humorously and disturbingly exploring the dark side of American pop culture and politics. His pieces aim to question humanity, the modern day and aims to incite the imagination, exploring notions of "the self" in the narcissistic world around us.

With a sense of urgency, Nobody Jr creates and performs surreal, distorted self-portraits appropriated from memories of dreams, considering the resulting images "subconscious, animalistic rejection of our increasingly computerised and corporatised reality".

He finds inspiration in subjects such as Body Dysmorphia and its relationship to our obsession with the online world. Exploring surveillance, tracking and information-grabbing, Nobody Jr alludes to the current political zeitgeist and how these mediums affect our perception of reality. Fake Smears and Facial Food Fiascos uses comedy, the hideous, and the spiritual to map the complexities of the human soul.

Since the early 1990s, David Henry Nobody Jr has been showing in NYC and internationally, producing numerous creative “actions” and objects including the Human Weeble Wobble. He is notoriously known as the “bad boy artist” who impersonated Alex Von Furstenberg for a year, crashing countless VIP parties in NYC in 2000. The project became his first solo show and caused a national media scandal after he publicly exhibited photos documenting his interactions with President Clinton, Sarah Jessica Parker and even the real Alex.

Nobody Jr. predicted the Trump presidency in his 1999 Stalking Trump series in which he tried to meet Donald Trump as many times as possible in one year. He independently created “Trump for President 2000” signs, testing public reaction in a series of prescient street performances documented in video.

David is a founding member of the Fantastic Nobodies, a renegade/outsider/performance art collective, which was a collaboration of five artists from 2003 to 2013. The Nobodies have shown in Berlin and in New York, most notably with Andrew Edlin Gallery and at WhiteBox. Recently, the artist presented a solo show and performance series at MOCA Tucson. Find out more: www.davidhenrybrownjr.com.

David Henry Nobody Jr's self-portrait with curly blonde hair, his face obscured by pink fabric petals and red tomatoes arranged as a mask
Surreal self-portrait where sliced white bread fans out on either side of a grotesque face mask made from food and paint, with purple-painted eyes, set against a yellow spherical form
A figure's head made entirely of mashed potato, broccoli florets, meatballs and crispy fried onions, with visible eyes peering through the food mask, atop a brown sculptural neck against a white background
Artist David Henry Nobody Jr wears a wearable sculpture made of white horse heads and pink fabric across his face and torso, with human hair and botanical elements incorporated into the surreal mask
A grotesque mask made from blister packs of pills and medications arranged to form a face with wide eyes and open mouth, adorned with pink pill strips and amber medicine bottles at the base against a grey background
Surreal self-portrait with a crocodile head and googly-eyed hot dog fingers protruding from a mass of chartreuse slime studded with broccoli florets
Person with purple-painted head wearing a surreal mask made from purple cabbage halves, green leaves, red pepper and onion slices arranged as facial features
Artist with green-tinted skin and black soil covering their face wears a pink dollhouse-shaped structure as a mask against a blue background
Artist David Henry Nobody Jr's self-portrait featuring a face split into colourful sections with red and pink sculptural elements, covered in food and decorative materials
Surreal self-portrait mask made from sliced SPAM, pink meat, black straps, yellow fabric and a Rubik's cube, with exaggerated painted features and white hair
David Henry Nobody Jr's self-portrait with a fragmented mask made of magazine clippings, cosmetics and colourful materials obscuring his face against a grey background
David Henry Nobody Jr's self-portrait with dark face paint, yellow and black striped mask, green eye circle and dark voluminous hair piled on top of head
A grotesque face made of chocolate, jam and biscuit pieces with staring eyes, sandwiched between two slices of bread held by someone's hands
David Henry Nobody Jr wears a transparent plastic mask collage featuring distorted facial features including an eye patch, against a blue shirt and pale blonde wig
Share

Further Reading