ToyCyte: Toy Culture Collected

You know with a post title like that, I’m hoping for a Digg or at least a Pingback, right? Call it a skill or a curse, but I’m forever connecting somewhat disparate things and finding patterns in seeming randomness. Someday we’ll be officially part cyborg and will be hyperlinking just by blinking, but for now I just blog about it.

When I was going through the Phillips de Pury Urban Art auction catalog, I noticed a few toys that were reproductions, but also a few toys that were, um, reproductive. The most obvious of these is the 13-inch fiberglass Vagina Brain Monster by Carlos Enriquez Gonzalez (above left). You may remember Carlos from this post featuring his Max Toy Exclusive hand-painted Eyezon. This time around, he’s got his eyes on (groan, sorry) something south of the border. Carlos lives and works in Venezuela where he draws heavily on his childhood influences from vinyl figural toys made of Japanese vintage (60’s – 80’s) live-action and anime TV and movie monster and superhero robot characters. But, as Steve Agin who heads up Toys at PdP writes:

“He has transformed them into personal sculptural flights into the exploration of cosmic philosophical and astro-metaphysical artwork, which seems most comfortable nestled in-between Jean Cocteau’s beauteous fantasy and Max Ernst’s ’seriously’ Surrealist monstrosity. For Mr. Gonzalez, a vagina represents passage in time and space and, the journey from one reality to another, possibly a more enlightened one. His work is intensely rich in text and beautiful in its impassioned ‘viscereality’.”

Carlos has two pieces in the London show (the other being a 2-foot tall interpretation of “Astroboy”) and, four more coming in New York’s October auction. On the same tip as the Vagina Brain Monster, there’s also the piece entitled, Flower Mons, 8 inches of phosphorescent vinyl produced by M-1 Co. in Japan (above right).

And then from the big V, we go to the big W, with two pieces taking on the subject of war. Bob Conge’s WAR (below right) is a hand-cast urethane figure from his original sculpt. This one-of-a-kind hand-painted figure is 10 inches high and fitted with glass inset eyes. Bob’s original color pencil sketch for the WAR piece is included in an 11″ X 14″ frame. Writes Steve:

A far cry from CEG’s Vagina Brain Monster, Conge’s WAR too is influenced by a deep and abiding reverence for the Japanese character toy tradition. In both cases, the artists have lept beyond the ‘toy identity’ to a more universal realm profoundly situated in the art of popular world culture and in Bob Conge’s case his work is powerful and at times humorous while at other times brutal social commentary.”

Finally, we get to Tim Biskup’s War-Dragon (below left), another anti-war statement but couched in a Japanese style, vinyl plaything. This 12-inch traditional type figure has been made to ‘open wide and swallow’ pewter effigies of guns, knives, etc. as well as brightly colored and glow bits of other sacrificed vinyl figures. Writes Steve: “Ingenious, carnivorous and transparent as modern art.” It comes in a hand-painted tin coffin.

So is it me or are you getting a “Make Love Not War” vibe, too? Or does the title of this post mean I’m going to receive accidental pingbacks from Code Pink?

Can’t get enough coverage of the PdP Urban Art auction? Check out my posts on Urban Art here, Art Toys here and Kaiju here. And special posts on Kaws pieces’ here, Suckadelic’s piece here and Buff Monster’s painting here. Then head over to the auction and place your bids here. The auction takes place in London on September 6th and New York on October 25th. The complete online catalog is now available at phillipsdepury.com.

Related posts

• Take a Trip on the Mushroom Carousel by Carlos Enriquez-Gonzalez
• Bob Conge Teaches a History Lesson With Sum and Son of Sum
• Vinyl Toy Network Winter 2008: The ToyCyte Round-up
• Urban and Street Art at Phillips de Pury Auction
• TTF o8 Afterparty With Tim Biskup