The Strasbourg-based artist Antoine Bernhart started to create his trademark drawings in the mid-1960s, and they were first published along with Christian Bernard’s writings in 1968 as a book called H. This drew the attention of Phases, an international art group created by Edouard Jaguer, bringing together writers and artists inspired by the surrealist poet the Comte de Lautréamont (the nom de plume of Isidore Lucien Ducasse, 1846–70). Bernhart’s detailed drawings, depiciting erotic carnal entanglements, were published in the Phases magazine, but Bernhart was eventually expelled from the group because his drawings were considered excessively pornographic. Bernhart then moved in alternative circles outside of institutional art, and joined a network of counter-culture artists. For several years his main work was creating record covers, posters and flyers for psychobilly, garage and punk bands like The Cramps, The Meteors, The Rattlers, The Vibes, Tall Boys, Screaming Kids, and The Cannibals.

In the 1990s, after several trips to Japan and a growing fascination with Japanese erotic culture, his work became more radical. It began to incorporate a mix of trash and subversive themes, featuring characters resembling mechanical dolls in macabre erotic scenes. His time in Japan Japan familiarised him with the theatrical form of the Ero-Guro movement, which manifested itself in Grand Guignol-esque performances where naked young women pretended to disembowel themselves before a breathless audience. By transposing this exaltation of grotesque and cruel sex to the dark forests along the Rhine, the more or less forbidden playgrounds of his childhood, Antoine Bernhart created a nightmarish bridge between the Japanese underground, the Marquis de Sade, and a decidedly explicit reading of the Brothers Grimm.

Bernhart’s works often depict mutilation, murder, rape, mutilations of all kinds, bestiality and coprophagia; his catalogue of barbaric acts is chilling in its apparent inexhaustibility. Provocative and fascinating, his works have notably been presented, not without controversy, at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Geneva, the Musée de l’Érotisme in Paris, the Tomi Ungerer Museum in Strasbourg, the Bongoût Gallery in Berlin, and the Arts Factory Gallery in Paris.

Antoine Bernhart’s website is here, though it has not been updated since 2014.

We are very grateful to our Russian friend Yuri for introducing us to the work of this artist, and for supplying most of the images.

Similar artists

Hans Bellmer – German-French surrealist of erotic body imagery and disturbing fragmentation.
Daisuke Ichiba – Japanese illustrator of transgressive erotic-grotesque content.
Patrick Jannin – French contemporary illustrator of grotesque-erotic fantasy.
Stu Mead – American underground painter of transgressive sexual subject matter.
Reinhard Scheibner – German contemporary illustrator of grotesque-erotic fantasy.
Vania Zouravliov – Russian-British illustrator of dark erotic-fantastical content.