7 Artists Whose Work Will Give You Nightmares

According to one Reddit group, the woman in the final shot is supposed to be Paris Hilton. Even though it isn't an exact match, the slight inaccuracy is actually understandable -- you'd better replicate her by stretching plastic bags over a bored sparrow's skeleton (but only if the bags previously housed cocaine). Still, that is one conventionally attractive pig.

... I know you're waiting for an "And the swine, too!" punchline, but know that it will never come. I save my Hilton loathing for the banal way she slouches through life.

Is this series an art project? Well ... obviously it is, but did any of this happen? Did a pig just become a decapitated blonde? The source is a magazine called Hurt You Bad, but good luck finding a copy. Like Necronomicons, it's limited to a select run and on display only to those whose magical will may resist its dark urgings.

The creator could be a plastic surgeon or it could be an artist or it could be a maniac. If you read through that Reddit thread I linked to earlier, one person suggests that the pig's head is being replaced by modeling clay (or maybe wax) toward the end, and that makes a lot of sense. The shenanigans of its faux transformation aside, isn't the greater point about what it means for women? And society? And pigs with body issues? Is this why those cartoon pigs are always so happy on butchers' logos? Because they're not Paris Hilton?

julos/iStock/Getty Images

Lacking a title for this piece, I think we can all agree it's called i am! pig-fuck-meat (Blonde), and then never speak of it again. What does it say about a work of art that the decapitated woman's head on a platter is the least horrifying thing about it? And why am I now picturing this as the pig's head from Lord Of The Flies? And why does that now feel like an erotic novel to me?

With all that raw, unpreserved flesh, these sculptures must rot in no time at all, which may be the key to defeating them when they awaken to amass the living for their own art projects.

Heide Hatry

Hatry crafted these decaying statues to remind you you're going to die: what's commonly referred to in medieval art (as well as these tattoos inside my eyelids) as a memento mori. Although, in this case it certainly seems more like a threat than a reminder.

Most of Gio's work is your usual Middle Ages subject matter: scrawny people with sour faces thanking God for not smiting them. But, oh boy, when you commission a painting of Hell from him, you are going to get your florin's worth.

The centerpiece is a gigantic Beelzebub devouring sinners even as the head in his diabolical crotch spews them out to begin again. What kind of spatial warp digestive system spits a man out of vagina-jaws before he's even fully consumed? Is this an infinite loop?

However it works, it's a raw deal. You have sex one time with an eye on blocking conception, and you're endlessly shat out of Satan's pelvic mouth for all eternity. Such punishment is flat-out hypocrisy, considering elsewhere in the scene a 15th century PornHub clip is on pause:

Everything on PornHub is pirated

Five men with suspected Al-Qaeda ties were arrested in 2002 before they could enact a plan to blow up the Bolognini Chapel Of The San Petronio Basilica, where the fresco resides. Blowing up a church sounds like something a terrorist might do, but in this case it was secondary to their main goal of getting at that painting. Why? Well:

Does it matter? He's too dead to sue.

That's the Prophet being tortured by a demon for ... I dunno, listening to rock 'n' roll or something. Hey, I don't want to be the guy who sides with Al-Qaeda, art vandals, and mad bombers, but I can see how Muhammad being rent to chops by talon-toed ifriti might be insulting to Islam.

Four years later, another bombing was thwarted. Plainly, this painting is indestructible. But in whose hand rests its invulnerability? The good Lord above, or the Devil who is enjoying this mega-sized album cover of his greatest hits?

Anyway, there's a great "How many terrorists does it take to destroy a painting?" joke in here somewhere.

One of his paintings, Trench, was so contentious for showing war's ugliness that a Cologne, Germany, museum had to display it separately and concealed by a curtain. The mayor of Cologne nixed the museum's purchase -- a legally permissible move because Dix had never declared "No backsies!" Then Mayor Crankypants forced the museum director to resign in disgrace.

At first I couldn't even find a picture of it and assumed it burns out the motherboard of every computer that tries to host it, but eventually I succeeded. Apparently it's possible to take a scan of a print-out of a photo of the original without Hell's armies crawling through the opening created by your belief.

JStor.org

People really hated that painting for showing them what the artist himself had to live through. In fact, apparently nobody knows what happened to it. It appears to have slipped into a private collection via sale, but most people think the Nazis simply burned it. That's right, Otto Dix painted a war scene so ghastly even Nazi warmongers were disgusted by it.

Of course, we all know the real answer is that Hell opened at midnight on the start of World War II to reclaim the painting's incubating power of destruction. By that point, the Nazis had destroyed or sold off some 260 of his paintings. That's probably why he painted Hitler as Envy among the Seven Deadly Sins:

OttoDix.org

When not depicting the inhumanity of war, he focused on sexual violence, which German has a single word for because it's German: lustmord. Dix painted Juvenalian satire just to prove it's not synonymous with humor.

He particularly protested the inhumane treatment of the wretched: veterans, beggars, the disabled, prostitutes. The real monsters are the society that walks past them.

OttoDix.org

So, yeah, his homeland put him through the meat grinder twice and spent the years in between resenting him for pointing out its failures. Despite that, he received a slew of awards in the last decade of his life. And in 2012 a bunch of his work resurfaced. Huzzah! A victory for Otto Dix is a blow against Hitler!

Imagine the horror stories suggested by his visions. Look at this Church Of The Saponified Capillary in the dead desert. You just know every one of its priests can lick the flesh from your bones in 10 seconds:

beksinski.pl

Or this literal night mare, entitled Dark Horse, which looks like Paul Klee and Stephen Gammell spliced a caiman onto a bull. If the apocalypse ever happens, God will have to create a fifth horseman, because the first four aren't qualified to mount such a hell-steed.

beksinski.pl

And yet ... his work's kind of nice, in a way. Apart from the obvious talent, it feels like the artist identifies with us, the viewer, or the oppressed subjects. Like, sure, here comes Baalmarqatziz, the anti-god whose face is a black hole, but the point of view is the man on the street's. Relax, bro. We will have a voice in the fires of his endlessly burning reign.

beksinski.pl

Beksinski didn't examine his own work much, but he did feel people took it wrong. It wasn't to be taken too seriously and was often optimistic. (Ha! Told you!)

In most pictures you find of him, he's got an affable smile. And why wouldn't he? He got all his darkness out in paint. It's like how Stephen King's just a regular dude around Bangor who very rarely summons the Elder Gods through his work anymore.

beksinski.pl

Unfortunately, his life did not end well. First, he lost his wife. Then, a year later, his son. The younger Beksinski committed suicide on Christmas Eve, and his poor father discovered the body. Six years later, he was stabbed by his caretaker's son after refusing to lend the young man the equivalent of a hundred bucks.

I guess we all learned something today. People are worse than anything Beksinski ever envisioned. On the other hand, he wasn't devoured by the oppressive forces that surround us all, so count that in the plus column.

beksinski.pl

Frederik Ruysch was a Dutch anatomist in the 17th and 18th centuries who worked entirely in the medium of human body parts. Mostly babies. Stillborn babies, to be honest. And boy did he have a knack for finding them.

Zymoglyphic.org

Ruysch didn't just stage some skeletal homunculi and call it a day. No, just like indigenous peoples, he used every part of the baby in his dioramas. His lush compositions featured foliage made of veins and lung tissue and depicted his subjects weeping into handkerchiefs made of membranes from the human brain.

Why were they weeping? Because death comes for us all, obviously. Every inch of his artwork was a memento mori, never letting people forget the Grim Reaper will come to purify them. This is a man who picked apart the corpses of children that never enjoyed one breath of air so that they could spend eternity dreading death with accessories made from their own body parts.

Zymoglyphic.org

In fact, the only part of these works that wasn't made from a baby mourning its own death was the mayfly some of them held, a symbol of our entire lives being but a single day in the maw of eternity.

Ruysch's crazy train didn't just leave the station; it derailed on the bridge over the canyon. I mean, try explaining to any other species that we dissect our own children and then preserve them as wailing visions of death to come.

He made "about a dozen" of them, which I think we all know means 13. If they're ever arranged in a circle to face each other, every raven on Earth will drop dead.

Zymoglyphic.org

Anyone else think he went too deep on this one? Imagine what a more chilling reminder of death this would be if he mixed their cremated remains into ink and illustrated a children's book about learning to grow and thrive, then only revealed his materials on the last page.

Now don't think this was Ruysch's only interest. He also kept busy decorating his jars of animal specimens with completely unrelated scenes from history. At this point, that's as close as you can hope for a welcome return to normalcy.

Unfortunately, none of those remain, so we're left with only his third hobby, which is straight-up decorating the (again, fetal human) corpses that he didn't disassemble and jarring them. You know, just in case you get a craving after the stores have closed.

You'd probably guess that painting is called Evil, thanks to the inhuman voices whispering that word endlessly as you gaze into its depths. You might have a harder time with The Poor Steward, which features inveterate liar and embarrassment to his faith and family Pat Robertson:

Jonathan Levine Gallery

But what about this work?

ChrisMarsPublishing.com

Yeah, think on that one for a second.

A vast amount of Mars' work deals with his brother's ordeal with schizophrenia. When he was just 5 years old, his teenage sibling was taken away, and young Mars was not at all impressed with the care that his beloved brother received or how it was handled at home. Pictures like the one above, as well as this ...

ChrisMarsPublishing.com

... are how the artist tries to understand and express his brother's world. Even though the first glance might make the viewer recoil, the work actually wants you to empathize with the subject. He told The A.V. Club:

"Visually through my work, over and over, I'm trying to create characters that are -- to some people they may be monstrous, and I hate that word, because I think they're just unique. Misfits."

So, yeah, he's humanizing figures you might at first mistake as monstrous, and he's finding the beauty in what makes folks different. He's taking you down to the depths only so that you'll appreciate the view once he leads you back to the top of the human soul: Chris Mars just taught you empathy.

Brendan McGinley drew a demon for a horror anthology once. He also discovered the much scarier 5 Weird Search Terms You Used, You Ninnyhammer. Here's his stupid Twitter feed: @BrendanMcGinley.

Brendan stared damnation in the eye before in 5 Reasons The Scariest Thing Ever Written Is A Kids' Book.

If you enjoyed those paintings of suffering and hellfire, you may be a monster, but you may also like 8 Real Photographs That Prove Hell Exists On Earth. If those aren't enough hellscapes for you then check out The 8 Creepiest Places On Earth and also seek help.

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Imagine being trapped aboard the doomed Titanic on an icy Atlantic. . . with the walking dead. Check out Chris Pauls and Matt Solomon's Deck Z: The Titanic.