Originally published in Twin Magazine.
Peter Linde Busk depicts failed heroes of myth, legend and popular culture—inadequate icons that struggle to live up to the expectations of their status. Kings, princes and soldiers are rendered pathetic, debased by scribbled marks and tangled limbs. They drown under the weight of detail, their bodies melting into a background that threatens to engulf them. “Sometimes I feel quite overwhelmed by the world, like everyone else,” Busk says. His figures look out at us with pleading stares. Their twisted faces exposing internal struggles with anxiety, dejection, neurosis and alienation.
“There is also something else at stake here,” he says. “My general concerns about the state of man in the late capitalist society we live in, and all the casualties thereof: the people left behind, the people who don’t fit in or can’t cope with the brutal business of society today, the people who suddenly find themselves useless and unwanted.”
With paintings, collage, ceramics and prints, Busk creates his own museum of the fallen, as though attempting to single-handedly balance out the endless portraits of the successful and wealthy in museums around the world. “History is, as we know, if not always then most of the time written by the victors. It’s like, not so much giving voice to the people who have fallen through the cracks of society, but giving them a face.”
Like an avid hoarder pillaging history for stylistic influences, his works are a mesh of styles, cultural references and abstract pattern, with characters that emerge ambiguous from this poetic jumble.
For more information about Peter Linde Busk’s work see joshlilleygallery.com/peter-linde-busk.