Lupus Garrett, a Missouri native with over 5 decades of studio days under his belt, has been aptly described as “a committed bricoleur” (by Tom Piche, Director of the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, where Garrett’s work was featured as a major solo exhibition in 2010). A bricoleur is a practitioner of bricolage, creative effort that draws on anything and everything at hand. Garrett states, “My influences are many and seemingly incongruous; Louis VIX, photography, Picasso, African American quilts, French furniture, Frank Gehry, standard poodles, the Missouri River, Cajun music, rock walls, farmhouses, Victorian furniture, Modernism, Abstract Expressionism, Native American relics, William Burroughs, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, children’s drawings, Mexican masks, folk art, sex, religiosity, Louise Nevelson, sloppy gardens, Pop Art, Coca Cola advertising, and red and green.” At its heart, the work is a maximal, obsessive act of storytelling, as Garrett invents histories and narratives for the subjects of anonymous, vintage photographic portraits that began as one of his many collections.
