The title announces Bernstein’s characteristic blend of provocation and dark humour. Dicks of Death takes its name from a marine nickname for the processed beef franks served with beans in military rations, so called for their foul taste and phallic resemblance. In appropriating this piece of barracks slang, Bernstein plants her work squarely at the intersection of military culture, masculinity, and bodily grotesquerie that has defined her practice for over five decades.

The drawings collected under this title span from 1966 to 2016, making the project less a discrete series than a retrospective distillation of Bernstein’s relationship with the phallus as political symbol. Emerging from striped grounds, mottled and musty phallic forms interrupt and fuse with traditional patriotic motifs, while scrawled slogans are obscured by white ejaculate. The continued engagement with screws and cocks closes in on the machinery of the military industrial complex, with the morphing of body parts into political tools sitting at the very centre of her project.

Stuffed phalluses, blood, and semen are juxtaposed with national imagery and the US flag – humorous but deadly serious. The charcoal medium is essential here: gritty, physical, and unforgiving, it carries the weight of both protest and pleasure. Where Birth of the Universe reached outward to the cosmos, Dicks of Death is resolutely earthbound, rooted in the body, in war, in the absurdity of power, and no less formidable.