Eye Infection

Here are five artists rarely mentioned in the same sentence--and never before collected together in one book. How to reconcile Robert Crumb's cult-status comic offenses with Mike Kelley's taboo, childish handiwork and Jim Nutt's measured, dogged portraits? How to link Peter Saul's violent, colorful caricatures with H.C. Westermann's eccentric folk fancies? Though none belong firmly to the artistic mainstream, each of these artistic mavericks has exerted a strong influence on their contemporaries and on generations of younger artists--infecting their eyes, if you will, with a shared visual language influenced by comic books, advertisements, folk art, and daily life. Often run through with explicit sexuality and violence, and always visually bombastic, the works presented in Eye Infection are not for the faint-hearted or soft-eyed but for the pop-culture aficionado, the surreptitious comics reader, the humorist, the eccentric, and, of course, the follower of contemporary art.