What the hell is this?
Few images have achieved what The Crying Boy has. Not because it changed the course of art history, but because it quietly colonised the walls of millions of ordinary homes with the unwavering determination of patterned wallpaper.
Painted by Giovanni Bragolin and reproduced on an industrial scale, these tearful children became an unlikely global icon. Somewhere between fine art and furniture, sentiment and supermarket décor, they transcended taste altogether. To own one was never really a decision. They simply… appeared.
Then, in a triumph of tabloid journalism and collective imagination, the prints acquired an even greater distinction: they were allegedly cursed. Reports emerged of houses reduced to ashes while The Crying Boy emerged unscathed, gazing mournfully from the rubble as if mildly inconvenienced. Rational explanations exist. They are considerably less entertaining.
Today, these prints occupy a rare cultural category: universally recognisable, endlessly reproduced, critically unfashionable, strangely beloved, and impossible to improve upon. So naturally, we’ve printed them on clothing and shit.
This collection is a tribute to mass production, folklore, nostalgia, moral panic, and children who apparently refuse to stop crying.