Bad Painting number 50:
Prisoner cutting himself in solitary confinement.
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Jay Rechsteiner
Acrylic on canvas
23 cm x 30.5 cm
​GBP 550 (exclusive shipping costs)
This medium-sized oil & acrylic painting on canvas is part of Rechsteiner's controversial series simply titled 'Bad Painting'.

BAD PAINTING is a series of paintings that Swiss artist Jay Rechsteiner categorizes as Bad Realism which is work that is bad in terms of style, craftsmanship & content. The badly executed paintings represent the underlying bad reality of the actions depicted. The work challenges the Western sense of beauty, perfectionism and fear of failure. Rooms are distorted, bodies are out of proportion, shadows fall into the wrong direction etc.
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The term Bad Painting was coined by the critic and curator Marcia Tucker in the 70s. Rechsteiner has always been fascinated by the freedom of 'bad' painters such as Joan Brown or Neil Jenney. 'Bad' painting doesn't only set me free from the constraints of 'good' & 'decent' technique but also gives me a feeling of everything-goes and everything-is-fine. 
Jay Rechsteiner’s Bad Paintings (2013) bring the horrors of human culpability front and center. We don’t have to look too far to see the atrocities within our communities. Turn on the news, take an extended walk through familiar streets. Sadness and pain are everywhere. Rechsteiner states that his “main interest [is] in the underlying structure of things [and how] his artworks directly respond to the surrounding environment and . . . everyday experiences.” We so often look for beauty in everything. Why not accept the ugliness of misery? Confront it and learn how to deal with it? Rechsteiner wrestles with these ideas in his studio and asks the same of his veiwer. He wishes to “demonstrate how life extends beyond [our] own subjective limits,” to tell “a story about the effects of global cultural interaction,” and “the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own ‘cannibal’ and ‘civilized’ selves.”  John Ros, GalleryEll