Damien Hirst and Rankin’s ‘Myths, Monsters, and Legends’: Millionaire Artists Photograph Wookiees With Boobs

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FIERTH

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[LAWeekly] “Myths, Monsters, and Legends,”the newest show at Rankin L.A., is the obvious product of two good friends completely enjoying themselves — if the two friends were super famous millionaire artists whose idea of a good time was to dress up a supermodel in enough prosthetic make-up so that she looked like a Wookiee with perfect breasts.

In fact, the collaboration between Rankin, a photographer known primarily for his celebrity portraits, and Damien Hirst, a conceptual artist known for suspending dead animals in formaldehyde, makes perfect sense. Alike in age, working class British backgrounds, artistic education, and, quite frankly, close enough in looks to be related, the two men have experienced a near simultaneous trajectory of success.

From their cheeky debuts in the early 90s, both have enjoyed an endless wave of mega-success and celebrity in the intervening decades. The approximately two dozen large-format photos in this show range from the sublime (a gorgeous Medusa with skin as luscious as soft black licorice, a satyr that would make Matthew Barney proud) to the downright spooky (see: Wookiee boobs, below), and are technically exquisite and deliciously layered in meaning.

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