ART BIZARRE
A woman bleeds a strange blackness from between her legs. A mobile-phone user's ear becomes leprous and scabby, the lobe sealing over with radiated skinflakes. A man shows off his castration. A stretches its claw out, looking like geriatric old lady reaching for a runaway child. The runaway child is you, but you will not get away. She will catch you, then she will cut you into small pieces and eat you with icing sugar. Despite it really being a chicken, not an old lady at all. Larry Dunstan, nice, polite and agreeable man though he appears, is one of us. He's got our kind of mind - and that mans twisty and labyrinthine, with all sorts of dark Tim Burton things happening in it.

That makes it all the more surprising that those unlikely champions of the bizarre at Selfridges of London have decided to go for broke and put loads of his pictures along their Oxford Street windows. Hear the screams of ladies who lunch, see the horror on the face of pushchair bound cherub. Marvellous.
"I've always been into slightly underbelly-type things," he told us. "The things you don't think about when you see something, but all the time it's there. The side that you don't hear about, like you see a beautiful woman wearing lipstick. A lot of people will take her photo. But I'd do something based on the fact that the average woman swallows 8lb of lipstick in her lifetime. That dark side is waiting there." The manipulation he performs with his photos take the self-consciously arty pics down a side-road and shows them something nasty he keeps in a matchbox. The result is all the more shocking because it feels like a Gap advert but looks like a Hieronymus Bosch nightmare and tastes of purest fear.

Dunstan came fairly late to art, having started off in his Dad's construction business. This is the work of a man who knows what it's like to do the 9 to 5 "with a universe of abnormal thoughts in my head, and nowhere to flush them out." Until now that is. Larry Dunstan. Lovely guy. Best artist of his generation. But you wouldn't want him to design your mum's birthday card.

words by Matt Potter

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