About
Otto Youngers explains his world view.
Otto Youngers is a champion of the “maximal”, a force that reclaims storytelling,
craftsmanship, and the material presence of art in the world of art where “more”
really is “more”.
Viewers walk through his exhibits as participants in a giant
diorama, a mythical world of “Benevolent Malevolence”inhabited by characters
made real from Youngers’ vivid imagination. He encourages the same wonder he
had in the favored museums of his youth where he discovered meticulous exhibits
of animals and humans, past and present. “I thrive on translating my vision in
both the scale and scope necessary to provide a signature sensory experience
for viewers”says Youngers. Youngers’ work does not have the seemingly objective
nature inherent in museum artifacts. His work is multilayered and charged.
Reclaimed wood, his primary material is transformed into complex sculptures that are
rough and refined, contemporary yet somehow seminal or folk. In his inimitable
style, Youngers’ deals with the difficult topics of war, greed, destruction,
and the forces that perpetuate them. Some pieces are more pointed than
others, violence poking its head disturbingly from under the cloak of humor that
initially invites the viewer in. Others reveal the paradoxes of our human comedy, extrapolations
of interior lives laid bare for our contemplation. And others are just
humorous. Figures are engaged in personal follies, three-dimensional snapshots
of life as they know it, their intimate psychology revealed. Each sculpture
adds a new chapter to a larger commentary on human nature becoming its own
surreal mythology.
As in medieval European artwork and in folk traditions, skeletons and body parts are
prevalent in his work, reminiscent of “momento mori”used in the Middle Ages or “day
of the dead” in Mexico, they represent our mortality. The bones are beautiful.
Regardless of our fleshly trappings, what lies underneath is basically the
same, and Youngers illustrates it exquisitely. Like an exercise in anatomy,
Youngers creates skeletal structures that seem perfectly feasible, but they are
invented. This is a transformation on a fundamental level that alters the
foundation of our imagination. “I am interested in showing what is under our
skin, literally and figuratively. On the serious side, the skeletons represent
decay and destruction, the result of our poor judgment. On the comic side, I am
providing people with “x-ray vision” like superheroes, allowing them to see
what is going on under our skin,”said Youngers. “The skeleton is the great equalizer;
within the animal kingdom, our bones are more similar than different.” The
unifying force of the skeleton transcends time, class, race, and religion and
makes Youngers’ commentary universal.
