Baby Baby Wild Things

Prints and Multiples CR023 - 027

New York, 1968

A complete portfolio of one colour screenprint title page and five colour screenprints, all printed on smooth white paper

Portfolio size: 61 x 91 cm

Each sheet signed and numbered in pencil

Each sheet titled and dated in pencil

Edition limited to 200

(Issued in pink flocked portfolio, blue screenprinted title to upper board, lined with blue paper, with lace flaps and French blue velvet ties)

Printed by the artist

Published by the artist, with his blindstamp

BABY BABY WILD THINGS is the name of an all girl rock group formed by Galina and some of her friends. They did not get far with it. As I remember, the only really proficient musician among them played the French horn which, when you think of it, was unusual. There were rehearsals but the group never played in public. The screenprints are all based on paintings made between 1963 and 1967. The sources were magazine photographs; not hardcore or even girlie mags, but "happy days" images. The iconography of attraction is essentially bourgeois. The perfection is unworldly, unreal. The references are as much to the smooth fibreglass shells of a Formula One car as they are to human bodies: the bands of colour on the swimsuits are kin to the racing stripes on a Lotus. The self absorption of the subjects reinforce their inaccessible and mysterious nature in the same way that the working of a complex and beautiful piece of technology might remain beyond comprehension yet at the same time be convincing. Gerald Laing, Kinkell, 2006