close
close

You have no items in your shopping cart.

Continue Shopping
Untitled

Untitled, 2010 - Ed Templeton

Untitled

about this work

Untitled (2010) is based on Everybody wants to fuck young girls, an acrylic on paper Templeton painted in 2009. The work is inspired by the famous arrest of Polish-French film director Roman Polanski based on an American warrant from 1978. The director of Chinatown, Rosemary's Baby and The Pianist, whose pregnant wife Sharon Tate was butchered in their home by Charles Manson's cult followers in 1969, was arrested in a Zurich airport in 2009 after having lived in exile for 31 years.

Polanski was 44 and already a twice-Oscar-nominated director in March 1977 when he had sex with Samantha Gailey, a 13-year-old model he had hired for a photo shoot, at Jack Nicholson's house in Los Angeles. He has argued that the sex was consensual, saying the girl was "not unresponsive", though Gailey said he drugged her with painkillers and champagne before assaulting her. The director pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse in a deal with prosecutors that saw them drop charges of rape, drugging and sodomy, which could have carried a life sentence, but fled the country anyway in February 1978 when it became apparent that he was likely to serve time in prison.

This edition was published on the occasion of Ed Templeton's solo exhibition The Cemetery of Reason at S.M.A.K. in Ghent in 2010.

about Ed Templeton

Ed Templeton visualizes the contemporary human condition in a whirlwind of present-tense imagery, filtered through photographs, paintings and drawings. Over the past decades, Templeton has built an oeuvre that closely tracks his day-to-day reality; recording life in the Southern Californian suburbs, his flawed family background, his life as a professional skateboarder and internationally exhibiting artist, and the relationship between the artist and his muse - his wife Deanna.
 
Although he intensly documents his own life and that of the people surrounding him, his work transcends the autobiographical and exposes different social phenomenons without hints or hesitation. As he spents a lot of time with young people who are at an uncertain phase of discovery in their lives, topics such as dreams, hopes, worries and self-profiling often are central to the work of Templeton. He visualizes their sexuality, fear, aggression, happiness and problems without judgement. Ed Templeton frequently writes anecdotes, feelings or thoughts on his photographs, drawings and paintings - which provide the images a new, deepening lecture.
 
Ed Templeton has had numerous solo exhibitions including S.M.A.K., Ghent; Mucsarnok Muzeum, Budapest; Museo d’Arte di Nuoro, Sardinia; V1 Gallery, Copenhagen; Half Gallery, New York; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris.
 
His work was also featured in several group exhibitions at international institutions, including Beating around the bush at Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht; Art in the Streets at MOCA, Los Angeles; Biographical Forms at Reina Sofia, Madrid; Generations US at Pinchuk Art Center, Kiev; and Americans at Kunsthalle Wien. Templeton's work was also part of the legendary and highly-influential exhibition Beautiful Losers, which inaugurated at the Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati, Ohio in 2004 and toured the world the subsequent years.

Ed Templeton is represented by the following galleries;
click through to discover more of his work.

Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp

Nils Staerk, Copenhagen

Roberts & Tilton, Los Angeles

You can also find more work by Ed Templeton on his own website.

Learn more about this artist