BOB BICKNELL-KNIGHT

Jeff’s Second, 2020
Ink and acrylic on canvas
20 x 30 cm

Part of a series of paintings by Bob Bicknell-Knight depicting billionaires as trophy hunters, questioning how the 0.0001% spend their time and money, alongside critiquing the extreme wealth disparity around the world.

In the series of works, culminating in a solo exhibition Eat The Rich, a solo exhibition at Galerie Sono in Paris, Bicknell-Knight portrays various billionaires as trophy hunters. Trophy hunting is the act of hunting of wild game for human recreation. The trophy is the animal or part of the animal kept, and usually displayed, to represent the success of the hunt. The game sought is typically a large or impressively ornamented male, such as one having large horns or antlers. At the end of a successful hunt, the hunter will usually pose next to the slain animal for a photograph, to be distributed to friends and family members.

The initial pieces in the series, begun in 2019, were originally inspired by Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, and a personal challenge he had set himself, to only eat meat he’d killed himself for a year. Zuckerberg had entered into the challenge in an effort to be more thankful for the food he has to eat. He felt it was irresponsible not to remember that the animals he ate used to be alive. In a 2019 interview with Rolling Stone, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey stated that there was a year when Zuckerberg was only eating what he was killing and had a penchant for goat meat. Supposedly he would stun goats with a taser, cut their throat with a knife and have their bodies sent to a butcher to prepare. Being served goat for dinner whilst attending a dinner party at Zuckerberg’s house was Dorsey’s most memorable encounter with Zuckerberg. The original trophy hunter works, depicting Zuckerberg, imagining that he took this interest in animal killing further, becoming a trophy hunter.

The works are hybrid paintings, which began as digital images of real trophy hunters that Bicknell-Knight found online on various internet forums for trophy hunting. Towards the end of the project he had a huge archive of such images to work from. The images were digitally edited, inserting the heads of different billionaires onto each body using Photoshop before being printed onto canvas, stretched and painted onto with acrylic paint, with the offline artist’s hand interacting with the original digital image. The painting method explores the tension between the digital and physical sides of Bicknell-Knight’s practice and is a collaboration between his digital and physical working methods.

Jeff’s Second is part of a private collection.