Abstract
Pop Surrealism infuses Pop Art with Surrealism. It started as an underground art movement and it was considered to be Lowbrow art in the very beginning. One of the leading Pop Surrealistic artists, Mark Ryden, made his living as a commercial artist from 1988 to 1998. It was the 'Side Show' exhibition that introduced his work to a full scale audience. Stake-shaped meat, a girl with large eyes, blood, a yak, a bunny, Abraham Lincoln, are his subject matters. Uncanny feelings born from the juxtaposition of awkward images he puts together create cruel and sinister fantasies. Uncanniness indicates a feeling of "scary", "loathing", "creepy", "horrifying", "fearful" etc. It's favored in art as an important subject matter for expressing a "scary unfamiliarity" or a "creepy beauty". This feeling of uncanniness was discussed by major psychologists like E. Jentsch and S. Freud. Particularly, Freud defined this uncanniness as a feeling of fear that evokes an extreme anxiety-a feeling that we have known for a long time so we are very familiar with them. Small size paintings in the 'Blood’ Series by Mark Ryden; with titles like Drips, Fountain, Rose, The Cloven Bunny, Lincoln's Head, Wound and Weeping; set a relationship between the girl and blood to express a physical wound and a feeling of sadness. "Scary unfamiliarity" from his bloody perspective is a prevailing feeling in this series of work. Blood repeatedly used in each work accelerates a creepy feeling with terror and cruelty particularly when the radiant innocence you get from the girl's large eyes is contrasted with the terror of blood. It prompts to manifest "scary unfamiliarity".
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