Antoine Bernhart

Antoine Bernhart (born 1950) is a French drawing artist. A member of the neo-surrealist group Phases from 1968, he was excluded a few years later on the grounds that his pornography was too extreme. Antoine Bernhart then moved into alternative spheres to official art and its institutions, and joined a vast network of artists from the counter-culture, particularly the punk movement, producing posters and flyers for psychobilly bands such as the Cramps and The Meteor. He developed a radical, highly idiosyncratic body of work, painting scenes of sexual crime transposed into a theater of abuse and cruelty, obscene and sadistic, grotesque, infernal and ecstatic, defying all prohibitions and conventions, which eventually earned him the paradoxical recognition of gallery owners and major museums.