Strange Fruit 

Hereby I present my latest digital artwork to you titled Strange Fruit’, art print on canvas-120/80cm, limited & signed 1/5

Strange Fruit is my second portrait of Nina Simone. This is no.05 of the B- sides of the Heroes series. Her first portrait was called ‘Sugar In My Bowl’ and is part of the A-Sides series limited & signed edition 1/1.

All artworks from the Heroes series are fully staged from separate found images and are all digitally manipulated.

We see Nina Simone in a large room with a New York loft-like atmosphere. She shares this space with herself, on piano; her young aged daughterLisa and reverent Martin Luther King. King represents here her combativeness and the racial divided world she grew up in. The few bottles of Jajem standing on the kitchen worktop are referring to both her relationship to alcohol as to Amsterdam. This sophisticated space annex industrial living room almost seems a somewhat lonesome happy home. But it’s not. The wall-window behind the balustrade has the appearance of a theatre facade. This wall is filled with images of the racial segregation. The roots were Nina grew on and what she transcended. Simone stood her ground when it came to her right as a black singer and she demanded equal rights and opportunity. By doing so she was besides being a great artist, an inspiration for many. Her activism is clear and present in the song Strange Fruit, the song where this artwork is named after. 

The song Strange Fruit describes the bodies of black men hanging on a tree as strange fruit. A gruesome American history that still resonates in the V.S. of today.