B-Sides: SHAHEEN Modern and contemporary art, Cleveland, OH

B-side

The Destroyer, 2026

Powdered graphite on paper

14 x 10 inches

You know it was a convenient store not far from where you lived. You think it was a 7-Eleven. You know you saw a magazine there with a painted image by the artist Frank Frazetta. You think maybe it was a Heavy Metal Magazine from the late 1970s. You’re pretty sure that when you saw it you were on an errand with your mother, you even think that she bought this magazine for you. There would have been nothing else of interest to you there, rows of packaged food and refrigerated drinks, batteries, light bulbs and cigarettes and then there was this one thing unlike anything else there, this hulking figure of a semi nude barbarian reproduced on glossy paper swinging an ax at a swaying mob of writhing ghouls, a fantastical image painted so convincingly that it almost looked like a photograph. A brutal and other worldly cinematic tableau teeming with arrested energy. And at the center of it this singular figure overflowing with strength and fearlessness and clarity of purpose. All of this mattered to you, as soon as you saw it, and it stayed with you, and kept coming back to you, and still does. Why?