Rubik Shot Red Marilyn

Rubik Shot Red Marilyn derives from Invader’s series ‘Rubik Master Pieces’, in which he manipulates Rubik's Cubes to reproduce major works in the history of art as three-dimensional sculptures. Due to the restricted palette of the cubes, limited to six bright colours, famous paintings are transformed into abstract, pointillist mosaics whose full forms can only be discerned from afar or, as Invader himself suggests, through a smartphone camera.

Invader produced some of Andy Warhol’s iconic portraits of Marilyn Monroe from 1967. In this image, Marylin’s face, composed of white and orange squares, emerges over a pixelated field of red and orange. Despite the heavily simplified design, Marilyn’s seductive gaze and smiling lips are immediately recognisable. If Warhol’s original artwork is a comment on American society of the time, its consumerism and its obsession with fame, Invader’s version represents a homage to both a global celebrity and a revolutionary artist who disrupted the art world.

Like Warhol, Invader is more concerned with artistic experimentation rather than political opposition. Through this series, Invader is obviously playing with the history of art and making us discover or rediscover iconic artworks while surprising viewers with their new treatment. Moreover, the very term Rubikcubist is of course a reference to the cubist movement founded by Braque and Picasso at the beginning of the last century. Rubik Shot Red Marilyn, through its glossy finish and hypnotic arrangement of bright square fields of colour, dissects the shiny world of celebrity and stardom, taking apart one of its major icons and reducing her presence to simple, luminous coloured blocks.

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