SAINT LOUIS, MO.- The Saint Louis Art Museum opens Tom Huck and the Rebellious Tradition of Printmaking, an exhibition focused around the presentation of the artist’s newest woodblock prints—a large scale triptych titled The Transformation of Brandy Baghead. This will be the first display of The Transformation of Brandy Baghead in a museum.

In this exhibition, the Museum brings together more than a dozen works of art by seven other artists to illustrate what influences Huck. The Transformation of Brandy Baghead depicts a woman who is having herself turned into a chicken in order to enter an ice-skating contest. It is a satirical and absurd response to the contemporary phenomenon of reality television and plastic surgery. This will be accompanied by one earlier work from his “Bloody Bucket” series, and a grouping of prints by Durer, Burgkmair, Hogarth, Cruikshank, Ensor, Beckmann and Posada, selected by Huck to illustrate his influences.

“Huck’s prints are heir to a long tradition in printmaking of representing the grotesque in a manner that is both provocative and darkly comical,” said Eric Lutz, assistant curator of prints, drawings and photographs.

One of today’s most important St. Louis-based artists, the Saint Louis Art Museum provided Tom Huck with his first Museum exhibition in 2001 and has collected his two most important bodies of work. The exhibition will be on view in Gallery 209 through November 15, 2009.