Simon Fujiwara Who's Picasso-esque Yogic Gender Binary Contortion Catastrophe?, 2024

The painting Who's Picasso-esque Yogic Gender Binary Contortion Catastrophe? by Simon Fujiwara is from the artist's body of work featuring Who the Bær. Its iconography draws on Pablo Picasso’s famous anti-war manifesto-painting Guernica from 1937.

Fujiwara's work is a contemporary response to Picasso’s original. Depicting the specific bombing of Guernica, a town in Spain during the civil war, the original painting has since risen to the status of icon, symbolizing a call for peace and a cry against all war.

Who the Bear once again find themselves travelling through iconic works to explore their identity and in this work the agonizing need to achieve this goal is depicted.

The form depicted has both male and female genitalia as well as many sets of limbs, some extending away from the ‘body’ while others touch and grab each other. Drops of yellow liquid surround Bear who seem mortified when looking at a Bear shaped mask that they hold in between their hands.

Adding a bright blue background to the multi-color shaded form, Fujiwara's work obliquely alludes to the famously-monochromatic palette of Picasso's source image, inspired by the black-and-white imagery of the bombing that Picasso had seen in contemporary newsreels and periodicals.