Richie Culver
Disfiguration (5), 2025
Latex, ink, resin, oil and acrylic on PVC
220 x 180 cm
Further images
This body of work began in 2019 with a series of drawings, portraits and manipulated photography that depict World War I soldiers who underwent some of the earliest forms of...
This body of work began in 2019 with a series of drawings, portraits and manipulated photography that depict World War I soldiers who underwent some of the earliest forms of facial reconstruction under the care of surgeon Harold Gillies.
The choice of PVC is not simply practical or aesthetic; it introduces a critical conceptual dimension. As a synthetic material, it evokes the plasticity of reconstructed identity. Its clinical sheen and artificiality mirror the ways in which modernity intervenes upon the body, reshaping not only appearance but also memory and perception.
By translating painted surfaces through photography and industrial print, the works trace a layered process of mediation. Each stage, paint to pixel to ink on polymer, becomes an echo of transformation, a kind of metaphorical surgery that questions how we see and remember altered or damaged faces within the wider contexts of war, media, and technological progress.
These prints are not reproductions but new objects in their own right. Through their material evolution, they embody the tension between the organic and the artificial, the handmade and the manufactured. Across the six works, this shifting dialogue between image and substance becomes a reflection on reconstruction itself, not as restoration, but as a continual act of reinvention.
The choice of PVC is not simply practical or aesthetic; it introduces a critical conceptual dimension. As a synthetic material, it evokes the plasticity of reconstructed identity. Its clinical sheen and artificiality mirror the ways in which modernity intervenes upon the body, reshaping not only appearance but also memory and perception.
By translating painted surfaces through photography and industrial print, the works trace a layered process of mediation. Each stage, paint to pixel to ink on polymer, becomes an echo of transformation, a kind of metaphorical surgery that questions how we see and remember altered or damaged faces within the wider contexts of war, media, and technological progress.
These prints are not reproductions but new objects in their own right. Through their material evolution, they embody the tension between the organic and the artificial, the handmade and the manufactured. Across the six works, this shifting dialogue between image and substance becomes a reflection on reconstruction itself, not as restoration, but as a continual act of reinvention.