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Author: Birk, Sandow
Title: Overview of the Carnage South of Market (The Battle of San Francisco)
Place Published: Los Angeles
Publisher:
Date Published: 2000
Description:

Etching. Multi-color trial. 19.5x55 cm (7¾x21¾"). Artist Proof 3 of 4.

Signed by Sandow Birk at lower right. Sandow Birk is a painter and multimedia printmaker from Long Beach who has produced magnificent artists' books with Trillium Press and Arion Press. His paintings and prints enter a dialogue with canonical works of art history offering an often-caustic critique of contemporary America. The present etching is from his early, and celebrated series The Great War of the Californias, an imagined war between Northern and Southern California rendered in the style of WWI and WWII propaganda posters, combat art, and historical painting. "Birk's Historical Works parody the compositions, styles, and techniques of historically iconic paintings and political posters, which themselves were often cast as allegories based on earlier depictions of vignettes from classical and Biblical tales, and were in turn co-opted by the Hollywood film industry for purposes of its own." - Marcia Tanner from Sandow Birk's "In Smog and Thunder: Historical Works from the Great War of the Californias."

Fine.