Pablo Picasso created the series of 100 etchings known as the Vollard Suite between 1930 and 1937. Art historians often describe this period as the apex of his canonical career. The suite’s images are partly inspired by classical busts and motifs, including that of the mythological Minotaur, which had the head of a bull and the body of a man. The series is also – and far more controversially – inspired by an affair that Picasso initiated with a then 17-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter when was he was 46.
In her short Eyes and Horns, the South Korean director and animator Chaerin Im channels her ‘anger and frustration’ with the Westernised, male-dominated tilt of the art world into a kinetic, intensely immersive audiovisual experience. As a percussive score pounds in the background, Im contorts and transforms the hyper-masculine form of a minotaur in a flurry of visual sequences that obscure lines between male and female. In doing so, she provides a welcome provocation – a shrewd critique delivered with the force of a guttural scream.
