Somewhere between beat poetry and comedy ‘Slideshow Johnny’ can be found: a darkly surreal portrait of an experimental outside artist. Driven by his personal issues, Johnny expresses his ultimate Oedipal complex. BIO: Martin Skauen, born in 1975, was trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo. He is influenced by pop culture – strip cartoons and films of violence – but also by art historical depictions of death and destruction such as those painted by the Renaissance artists Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel. Martin Skauen’s recent work has mainly focused on drawing but he worked previously in such other media as video and music. Together with four of his male artist colleagues from Norway he founded the Tegneklubben in 2004. The idea with the club is simply to meet, drink beer and nibble cheese snacks while sketching and discussing art. It is an apocalyptic and wounded world that Martin Skauen depicts in his artwork. His subjects consist often of the naked and mutilated bodies of people and animals linked one to another in various ways. With hints of humour and irony he makes reference to some existing pictorial world, religion maybe, or spirituality, Greek mythology or pornography. In his works Skauen stages different situations in which the figures also serve as metaphors representing differing mental states.