Grab a cocktail inside an oversized rectum and then take in the unsettling sight of a sculptural red building graphically referencing humankind’s dominion over nature. Dreamed into being over a period of nearly twenty years by design collective Atelier van Lieshout, this series of over 20 sculptures and structures became an immersive exhibit at the annual Ruhrtriennale Festival in Bochum, Germany.

Collectively called The Good, The Bad and The Ugly – also the name of a mobile art lab created by the studio in 1998 – this series really lives up to its name, ranging from the aforementioned visual abstraction of bestiality to a pair of giant inhabitable heads placed horizontally on the grass. The Head Claudio & The Head Hermann call to mind an eerie statue at the abandoned ‘Gulliver’s Kingdom’ theme park in Japan.

With its lumpy beige textures mottled with red, a fleshy, human-fat-mimicking structure called Hagioscoop could very well be the answer to the question, “What’s the most viscerally disgusting material that a building could be made of?” The ‘Barrectum’ isn’t exactly pretty either, covered in veins and ending in a tangle of intestines that lead to a stomach and finally, a tongue.

But it’s the Domestikator that’s really the star of the show, even if you don’t particularly want to look at it too much. “Domesticator symbolizes the power of humanity over the world,” say the designers. “It pays tribute to the ingenuity, the sophistication and the capacities of humanity, to the power of organization, and to the use of this power to dominate, domesticate the natural environment.”

“The act of domestication, however, often leads to boundaries being sought or even crossed. Only a few taboos remain, and it is these taboos that the Domestikator seeks to address.”

Do these fleshy works of art manipulating human body parts into unnatural shapes make you uncomfortable? That’s probably just what the artist was going for. It’s difficult for us, as humans, to look upon images of our own flesh with emotional detachment, seeing it as we would the meat of other animals, or even as an organic medium for art and architecture. Don’t worry – most of these are not made of actual humans, but rather silicone, polymer clay and wax. Read on for a tent modeled on human intestines, a pillow made of human skin and the world’s grossest pair of stiletto heels.

Jonathan Payne

Jonathan Payne calls these deeply repulsive sculptures ‘FLESHLETTES,’ and that name says a lot. They’re basically lumps of human viscera, teeth, eyes and hair put together into little miniature packages. You probably never wanted to see a nipple with teeth, but here one is, nonetheless.

Andrea Hasler

A tent made of flesh, a giant lump of what looks like human fat serenely overlooking a cliff, and a series of disgusting handbags are among the organic works of Swiss artist Andrea Hasler, who aims to humanize objects with ‘emotional surfaces.’ The tent was modeled upon human intestines and is made of polystyrene and wax as well as leather and real blood.

Felix Deac

Romanian artist Felix Deac creates amorphous blobs of flesh replete with veins, moles, wrinkles and hair. While some might look like deformed human body parts, most are just abstract shapes reminiscent of nightmarish tumors that have taken on a life of their own.

Patricia Piccinini

Patricia Piccinini’s work is so shockingly realistic, photographs of it are often passed around the internet as clickbait, with people wondering ‘what the heck am I looking at?’ The controversial Australian artist creates sculptures of fantastical creatures with extremely human-like skin and hair.

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Art Made Flesh 35 Sculptures Rendered In Human Skin Hair

This skull is a three-dimensional object that you can hold in your hand, not an image that has been stretched and distorted in Photoshop. It’s one of many visually confusing sculptures by Robert Lazzarini, created in his Brooklyn studio after hours upon hours of research. Lazzarini often smashes objects to see how they change and fall apart before he goes about the process of distorting them with computer modeling and fabricating them anew.

Using bone dust to create his skulls, wood and steel to produce hammers and other materials that are appropriate for recreating the originals, Lazzarini painstakingly crafts each item in an altered form. Previously working with more free-form alterations manually, he now sticks to math for the most accurate results possible, with every detail in scale.

“In terms of subject matter, it’s representational, so people think it’s a type of Pop art,” Lazzarini told Blouin Art Info. “In some ways it is, but I think it really hinges more profoundly on the aftermath of Minimalism… One of the main problems of sculpture for me is its static nature. This kind of animation” [when the object changes as you walk around it] “for lack of a better word, gives the sensation that there’s activity where there really isn’t. It relates back to corporeally navigating something to understand it.”

Unlike the human eye, the lens of a camera can’t judge spatial relationships, and photographs can only ever show a flat representation of a subject. But what happens when you take those flat, two-dimensional images and create three-dimensional sculpture?

South Korean artist Gwon Osang pioneered a new form of art called photographic sculpture with a series called ‘Deodorant Type’. For each sculpture, Gwon took hundreds of photographs of a single model and layered them over mannequins for a result that is sometimes true to the form of the model, and sometimes altogether different, veering into bizarre proportions.

Sometimes, the strangeness of the work reveals itself slowly, as you view one fragment at a time. But in others, the deviation from reality is evident – a man with two tiny heads on his shoulders, or two torsos attached to a single pelvis wrestling with each other.

As an art student, Gwon wanted to work in a medium that would be lightweight and easy to transport. He was experimenting with photography at the time and decided to blend the two, enjoying the way that the combination allowed him to form his subjects into unusual or downright impossible poses while maintaining that sheen of realism that the photos lend each sculpture.

“I often tell my acquaintances that I like the concept of ‘an artist sent from heaven’ or an artistic genius, but that I don’t believe in such,” Gwon said in an interview with Arario Gallery curator Ju-hyeon Lee.

“I believe there are two types of people, those that really do not believe in the existence of a genius and the other, only denying the existence of a genius to be modest (where in reality, they believe they are the ‘genius’). I think I belong to the latter case. Not to brag that I’m a fabulous artist, but to show that I have a certain conviction in my work..’”