
Zombie Joe
2025
Zombie Joe is perhaps the most audaciously transgressive work in the Triple Trouble collection, using the literal detritus of human habit — the actual contents of an ashtray — as its primary material, combined with acrylic and paint on canvas. Hirst has long incorporated organic, decaying, or abject materials into his work to confront viewers with the unavoidable presence of mortality, and ash carries an almost archetypal symbolic weight, evoking cremation, ruin, and the aftermath of consumption. Invader's contribution shifts the register unexpectedly, with the pixelated aesthetic associated with his practice lending the figure of Zombie Joe a cartoonish, 8-bit quality that softens and simultaneously deepens the work's morbid content. The name Zombie Joe is casually human and yet deeply uncanny, suggesting a specific individual reduced to a kind of undead anonymity — a figure who persists beyond their own dissolution. The collision of cigarette ash, the most banal and throwaway of materials, with the gravity of fine art canvas speaks to both artists' shared interest in elevating the overlooked and forcing a confrontation with what we prefer to discard.
- Medium
- Contents of ashtray on canvas, acrylic and paint
- Dimensions
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