Times Square Nude, After Bosch, New York, USA, 4.5m x 1.5m, 2012–24

Times Square Nude, After Bosch is a panoramic digital montage that channels the surreal, grotesque sensibility of Hieronymus Bosch into the epicentre of modern hyper-capitalism—Times Square. Over 4.5 metres wide, it teems with monstrous figures, warped advertisements, and absurd hybrids of celebrity, technology, and desire. Like Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (c.1500), the work presents a nightmarish tableau of indulgence, delusion, and decay. Naked bodies and brand logos intermingle, exposing not just flesh, but the raw mechanics of a system that devours both image and identity.

In the spirit of Mark Fisher’s theory of “capitalist realism”—the notion that capitalism so thoroughly occupies the imagination that alternatives seem impossible—the piece stages a visual overload in which alienation becomes spectacle (Fisher, 2009). Dissent is commodified, and pleasure slips into a kind of aestheticised despair. Bosch’s haunting observation echoes through this contemporary fever dream: “Poor is the mind that always uses the inventions of others and invents nothing itself” (Gibson, 1973, p. 21). Here, invention lies in reassembling the debris—visual, ideological, corporeal—of a culture that’s lost its moral coordinates.

References:
Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books.
Gibson, W.S. (1973). Hieronymus Bosch. Thames and Hudson.
Bosch, H., quoted in Gibson, W.S. (1973), p. 21.