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“It’s just – frankly – it’s just a bit grotesque. There’s a certain kind of severed-head quality about it. Actually, these are things I wanted – I wanted it to look like a head served up on a platter.” —Red Grooms
Artist Red Grooms (b. June 7, 1937, Nashville, TN) is known as a Pop artist for his wry take on everyday life in often large-scale constructions ranging from a city bus to an old-school Times Square porn shop. What often stands out, though, is not just the humor, but the pervasive underlying sense of the absurd. Or, as he refers to his Dali-head-on-a-platter edition in this video from the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the “grotesque.”
In 1980 Grooms worked with legendary Minneapolis printmaker Vermillion Editions to create the delightful Dali Salad II (1980) – an expansion of an earlier, two-dimensional print referencing Dali. Grooms had an interest in doing a print featuring Dali, whom he described as an artist who has “both exploited and been exploited in printmaking.” The Minneapolis Institute of Art produced this interview as part of a 1987 series of documentaries about art.
