Artist Spotlight: Amazing Macabre Sculptures Featuring Horror And Other Pop Culture Characters From Artist Christopher Andres

Check out these amazing sculptures and an interview with artist Christopher Andres, featuring various horror characters.

These wonderfully detailed and macabre sculptures come from the mind of New Mexico based artist Christoper P Andres. He specializes in sculptures and masks that emphasizes on the horror genre, fantasy, and Halloween. Some of the films and television series that he has produced sculptures based upon include Labyrinth, Hellraiser, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Black Swan, Hannibal, Jeepers Creepers, Insidious, Parasyte, Watership Down, and The Exorcist. He has many more items that aren't related to popular culture, which can be seen or purchased at Etsy, Instagram, Twitter, and Tumbler. Check out his bio, interview, and the images below.

"Christopher P. Andres likens the spirit of his work to Clive Barker's poetic description of the Cenobites as "Repulsive Glamour" - images and sculptures that reconcile beauty and horror, play things and idols, the sacred and the blasphemous. Andres draws from the practical attitudes of Joel-Peter Witkin, Pierre et Gilles, Michael Ray Charles, and Rupaul. His sculptures echo veneration found both in the adult toy collector and the devotee of a saint statue. His work was a constant and delicious challenge at the institution where he earned his MFA, The University of Notre Dame."

TMS: What are your artistic influences?

CA: The list of my artistic influences would be long, but the artists I keep returning to are Joel-Peter Witkin for his tableaus of divine and sexual bodies, both living and dead, in intense states of beauty, ecstasy, and suffering - Pierre et Gilles for their glittering painted photographs as an almost opposite condition of being from Witkin’s as cosmetic artifice being real face seen through the mask. Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle showed me the operatic scale art can become and the exquisite perversion that is a force of endless creative potential. Alexander McQueen and Eiko Ishioka created costumes and adornments that are sublime testaments of how beautiful humans can become if they drag themselves into the creature of their imagination. Race and identity are very important to me in my work - Kara Walker’s horrific and perverse silhouettes perform the complex and plural power dynamics of blackness and whiteness. Michael Ray Charles is wonderfully blasphemous towards the whitewashing so prevalent in our American culture – his work is a shocking reminder of how contrived and codependent our identities are.

TMS: What were some of your favorite horror movies growing up?

CA: My older brothers tell me I was an obsessed five-year-old with Children of the Corn. I loved Isaac as a child messiah enacting a harvest black mass for “He walks behind the rows”. The Exorcist had an electricity about it - It was like the Devil actually had a part in the film and to watch it was to turn from God – at least that’s how the adults acted – scared by the possession they ignored the very-pro-God pro-faith message of the film. Clive Barker’s Nightbreed was probably the most influential for me – it entered my life when I started puberty (11ish - early like a lot of gay kids) It scared me as well as comforted me. I was terrified when Lori wanders through Midian looking for Boone and encounters the Nightbreed in all their gradients of monstrosity – thoughher horror becomes fascination. My feelings about the film had to do with encountering the intensity of otherness that is possible for us and dealing with being a part of a religious and/ or conservative culture that suppresses such chaotic diversity. Nightbreed is about otherness and queerness – concepts that were awakening within me; the film was a sanctuary for me much like the denizens of Midian found when called by their god Baphomet to find one another.

TMS: Were you initially interested in sculpture as an artform, or did you transition to it from something else?

CA: As early as I can remember I’d draw characters and creatures I liked and costume and modify my action figures and the occasionally stolen and highly coveted doll. I’d make myself toys out of plastic bags, wire, tape, scraps of cloth and yarn. My art making as a kid seem to coincide with the uneasiness experienced from others by my queerness. I gravitated to music which seemed acceptable and studied it through undergrad until I finally admitted to myself that I was an artist – then I studied art through photography in a program that encouraged multi-media – so I became sort of theatrical installation artist that incorporated images and sculpture.

TMS" Can you explain your artistic process?

CA: I’m not quite sure what my process is but there is a pattern. I do spend a lot of metal energy on imagination – I’m constantly creating images and characters in my head – imagining numerous possibilities with very specific details such as color, texture, materials, and most of all feeling – I concentrate on specific adjectives I want the viewer to experience with the piece or emotions I want the view to have. I map out the construction process and engineering in my head. I also sketch or draw out the character sometimes it come out in the drawing gin the first draft and other times it evolves over many versions. Once I have the character in mind I work very fast to get it out in to reality so that I can experience what I was feeling when I imagined it as soon as possible.

TMS: How long does a project typically take and what type of materials that you use?

I am very impatient when I work – I can’t wait to create the sculpture or object. But If I don’t take my time with elements that need time I fail that part. I Zen out into non-time and work hard until I feel satisfied. I use a lot of materials – some very much like the ones I used as a kid. I sculpt with polymer clay and epoxies, wire, cloth, glue and finishes, hair, and acrylic paints.

TMS: Do you have a go to soundtrack that you typically listen to while working?

CA: Music is the ultimate art form – I am passionate about the music I love. I usually have endless music or podcasts playing while I work – I have playlists that I created with themes like Midnight (music that makes me feel I’m in personal David Lynch film or a private Rocky Horror Picture Show or Repo! The Genetic Opera) or, Desert – music that conjures ghostly tales of the Mexican borderland or Synth – emotional and ethereal songs like the theme to the 1980’s film Communion, Tubular Bells, and Tangerine Dream’s Legend Soundtrack. I love the music of Purcell, Prokofiev, Mozart, Bach, Chopin, Stravinsky, Gorecki, Penderecki, Glass, Crumb, and many film score composers. The soundtrack to the film Hecho en Mexico is awesome. But overall the albums of Sarah Brightman, Lisa Gerrard, Azam Ali, and The Dead Can Dance are always in the score of my life.

TMS: How do you choose the projects or subject matter that you work on?

CA: I work on what arouses me. Monsters that are coded for queer, witches, saints, gods, mermaids, and clowns are all bent to my aesthetic philosophy of the collision of extremes – Glitter and gore, sex and death, holy and perverse. I am constantly creating highly sexualized characters to celebrate my tastes not often seen in popular culture.Most of my creations have a Luciferian or Satanic aura about them as it a philosophy like the code of Midian.

TMS: Do you have any special projects that you are currently working on?

CA: I just completed an exclusive suite of work for The Satanic Temple in their new headquarters in Salem Massachusetts – I used the complex and esoteric symbolism of Baphomet and placed it into racial, sexual, and power politics. I took some of the classic narratives of Satanism and Witchcraft and combined them with narrative themes in Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye.

TMS: What are some of your favorite movies, comics, television shows, and other current artists?

CA: I love The Witch, Ex Machina, Jacob’s Ladder, Candy Man, Lord of Illusions, Begotten – I don’t read comics often aside from graphic novels like Watchmen, Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, I did enjoy The UnMen ,Animal Man, and Batwoman. I love anything RuPaul’s Drag Race or Big Freedia. Hannibal, American Horror Story: Coven, Salem, and now West World is what I watch on TV. As for current artists - that list is also long but I’ve been enjoying the work of Tin Can Forest, Aeron Alfery, and Jon MacNair. The podcast I would highly recommend is The Faculty of Horror – it sets the bar for what a podcast can be – structured, organized, articulate, educational, and entertaining.

TMS: Is the online market your primary source of building and selling your brand? Or do you attend art and trade conventions, art shows, etc.?

CA: My main market is online through my etsy shop and through social media presence like Instagram, Facebook and Twiter– Please follow me! I’ll be creating a new website to feature all may work – my current website features my photography – www.christos-andres.com

TMS: Who is your favorite horror movie or character and why?

CA: That’s a hard one – But I’d have to say Hannibal Lecter – He’s highly ethical, erudite, and elegant (Pinhead-ish) He is the perfect combination of and realization of humanity as a horrific and abject meat bag with the artful potential of an opera singer. He delights in the tragedy of the conquer worm and the sublimity of The Goldberg Variations – and I would so much like to eat the rude. I love Silence of the Lambs and Hopkins portrayal. However, Mads Mikkelsen’s Hannibal takes the character much further into sexier and more Luciferian territories. I made a Wendigo as an homage to my favorite movie character as he was evolved through the TV show. And its available as a made to order through my shop!

TMS: What is the last song that you listened to?

CA: La llorna by Chevela Vargas

TMS: Finally, what was the last movie you watched?

CA: Hocus Pocus