Cary Leibowitz
Mudflap (Joan Collins has a Headache)
New York City, USA: Self-published, 2019
36 x 24 x 0.5"
Edition of 28
The first time I met Cary Leibowitz we flew him in for an exhibition at Art Metropole and when we asked about possible dinner plans for that evening, he seemed hesitant to commit. His reluctance? He was bidding on a photograph on Ebay and the auction closed at 10pm, so he needed to be near a computer. We chose a restaurant across the street from a colleague's home and made sure we were finished eating in time to ensure that he could secure the item, which turned out to be a picture of Andy Warhol cradling a pig.
Leibowitz has described his home in Harlem as being "decorated to within an inch of its life". Alongside works by his favourite artists (Kay Rosen, Jonathan Borofsky, Katharine Umsted, Peter Saul, etc.), the place is festooned with thrift shop, flea market and dollar store kitsch.
A couple of years ago, he bought his husband Simon [below] a desk that once belonged to Dynasty actress Joan Collins. When the desk was delivered from California the pair were delighted to discover a cache of items belonging to Collins: printed ephemera, her wallet, even her Neiman Marcus credit card.
The material prompted paintings and collages celebrating Collins’s camp-icon status, with Leibowitz being interested in "the idea that what we love about Joan Collins is that she wants to be Joan Collins as much as we want to be Joan Collins."
The version above belongs to a series of rubber truck mud flaps altered with vinyl lettering. Other texts in the series include “Vote for a Teenager,” “Faggy Faggy Boom Boom,” “Ughhh He’s Crying Again” and “Yes to Sliders, No to Slides, Shoulder Pads Welcome.”
It is available from Invisible Exports, here.
Cary Leibowitz and Simon Lince in outfits that not only match each other, but
also the furniture, inside their upstate New York cottage Linceowitz.
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