The striking mural above has something for everyone on the Trump Appreciation Spectrum. Fans will dig the steely determination on the 45th president’s face and drool over the Steampunk-esque Gatling gun he totes so casually from his right hand. Foes will see echoes of Triumph of the Will in Trump’s heroic pose – the eagle’s steely talons eager to dig into Trump’s, er, America’s enemies. Kudos to graffiti artist Darren Cullen, aka SER or Graffiti Kings for creating this jaw-droppingly imposing large-scale mural.
Kiss Me Deadly
The iconic 1979 photograph of the USSR’s Leonid Brezhnev and East Germany’s Erich Honnecker exchanging a “socialist fraternal kiss”, later reproduced in color on the Berlin Wall by artist Dmitri Vrubel, has spawned several referential works featuring Donald Trump. Perhaps the most notorious of these features Trump and Vladimir Putin doing the deed on a wall in Lithuania. This video offers a quick virtual visit to Vilnius where the mural is displayed.
Another more recent work by The Paintsmiths adorns a wall in Bristol, UK, and features a puckered-up pair of polarizing politicians infamous for their distinctive hairdos: Donald Trump and pro-Brexit campaigner Boris Johnson.
Several derivative works invoking the theme of a deadly Trumpian embrace have followed, making the device a sort of artistic/political meme. In the end, does love really trump all or does trump love only himself?
Art of the Face
French businessman/artist Thierry Ehrmann has turned his 17th-century home in the sleepy alpine village of Saint-Romain-au-Mont-d’Or into “The Abode of Chaos”; a complex interactive dystopian artwork that has provoked fury in some of his neighbors. An enigmatic-looking monochrome painted portrait of Donald Trump gazes out from one facet of a large outdoor sculpture.
Devilishly Good?
By the summer of 2016, Trump’s thunder was echoing down under… Australia, that is, Melbourne to be exact. Obviously the artist has a negative opinion of the now-45th president but one wonders what they’re attempting to evoke: overlord of the lizard people or some rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem? Why not both!
