In his new collection of prints, Bedlam, Joakim Drescher shares his disquiet with a world upside down. Drescher has spent more than a decade developing a vocabulary of visual storytelling to capture the grotesque absurdities of our time, in such a way as to enliven those who share his discomfort with the sense that their desire for something more is a desire for something possible. With Bedlam, Drescher has produced a series of prints that draw on this vocabulary to compose a fragmented world; a bacchanalia of obscenity, death and vulgarity that lets us revel in its allure even as we know we should be repulsed. The subtlety in Drescher’s work is how it articulates the political through the existential and the sensuous. His images never lose sight of the systemic construction of our circumstances, nor the despair at their core, nor the erotics that animate it all. These prints express both the necessary condemnation of corruption and the slow seduction that leads so many of us into becoming corrupt little lapdogs. Bedlam peels back the façade of civilization, parading the horrors, which were once deliberately obscured, in the stark daylight.

–      Macon Holt, Contributing editor at Passive/Aggressive

Joakim Drescher is a visual artist whose practice includes printmaking, drawing, painting, writing and publishing. Born in Denmark in 1986, he has lived in China, Indonesia, New Zealand, the Netherlands and the USA, before returning to Copenhagen in 2015, where he lives and works.

The work in the exhibition has been printed by Schäfer Grafisk Værksted and in part by the artist himself at Danske Grafikeres Hus.