By Agnes Andersson, Art Specialist
In the vast world of art, creativity knows no bounds, and some artists have found inspiration in a seemingly simple object but full of symbolism: playing cards.
I have managed to find four notable artists ⚡ who have taken the depiction of playing cards to new heights, each with their unique style and distinctive approach.
Marina Vargas: identity and question marks
Granada-born artist Marina Vargas has a project in which the popular and the cultured come together through a tarot spread. In her show there are nine cards, a large-scale reproduction of the cards revealed in a spread that a Cuban santera performed for the artist.
Marina Vargas is a multidisciplinary artist who delves into the search for identity and works on the questions she finds along the way.
Geronimo Araquistain: playing cards as a record of history
This ultra pop artist based in Argentina connects, through the analysis of the representations in the Spanish deck of cards, the history of conquest that the American continent has suffered for more than 500 years.
Geronimo Araquistain‘s irreverent style, the exacerbation of the size of the original object and the striking texture chosen for the representation make it impossible not to see what goes unnoticed in the everyday use of the cards.
Pure Pop: @geroaraquistain
Arturo Schwarz (1924-2021)
Dadaist and surrealist art playing cards. This deck of playing cards was created to celebrate the Israel Museum’s receipt of 700 works of Dadaist and Surrealist art by Arturo Schwarz (1924-2021), Italian scholar, art historian, poet, writer, lecturer, art consultant and curator of international art exhibitions.
The artist’s disorder and impudence, added to his Dadaist base, invites us to rethink the reason for some representations.
Alvaro Barrington: the working class experience through the ages.
In his own words Barrington’s King of Spades works are “a play on Cézanne’s Card Players, which are working class card players, except I did Eddie Murphy’s King of Spades from Coming to America.”
By making this connection, Alvaro Barrington inscribes his paintings into depictions of the working class experience throughout the ages, encouraging the viewer to contemplate these same themes, this time in the setting of New York City as he knew it.
These four artists demonstrate how playing cards, beyond their conventional use, can inspire creativity and become powerful means of artistic expression.
Whether through prints, paintings or collages, these artists invite us to rethink the apparent simplicity of playing cards and to appreciate the symbolic richness they can bring to the art world.
Agnes Andersson, Art Specialist
