Bush

Yeo’s series of portraits made from pornographic magazines was a sudden departure by Yeo from paint into collage as the portraits subverts the viewer’s expectations by using cut-up graphic imagery as the medium instead of paint on canvas. These works could be seen as performance pieces in the sense that there is an act of recognition and transformation in what the viewer sees, as they get closer to the work, which initially appears to be a well-constructed, straightforward painting. The first of these unorthodox portraits, Bush, was made in 2007 in response to a formal commission to paint the then President of the United States, George W. Bush, which fell through. Yeo’s initial disappointment led to him making this playful, but explicit, collage satirising the assumed moral superiority of the extreme right in American politics.