The animal was a browse-stopper. I glanced up at the bright green figure with the elongated body when I noticed an auction-goer lingering much too long at its table.
From where I stood, the thing looked like a big lizard with an equally big head. When I finally walked over and saw its face, I was creeped out. It had the body of an animal, but the face and hands of a human. It looked like something from “The Island of Dr. Moreau.”
Then I saw three baby frogs on its back, and realized that it was not a lizard. It was a leaping 3-foot-long frog sculpture that I could not imagine anyone would want in their home. Or wake up to see, an auctioneer joked.
I could find no visible artist’s name on the piece, and I wasn’t about to lift it to check the bottom since its front leg and a baby’s head had already been re-glued. It appeared to be ceramic or made of plaster.
Mixing animal with mankind seemed so unusual that I figured no else could be doing it. Wrong. Googling, I came across similar but different animal sculptures by New York artist Kate Clark, who puts human-looking faces on wild animals – but not as whimsically as the auction creature.
She uses the techniques of taxidermy in assembling her sculptures, as she explained in a video. Her aim, she says, is to “explore this overlap that exists across cultures, along histories, and within societies.”
Still, her works were just as unnerving as the auction frog.
Clark’s art and the frog-man are a far cry from the tropical frog and animal illusions created by Italian artist Johannes Stoetter, who paints people and positions them in such a way that they resemble animals. It’s hard to detect the bodies until they reveal themselves.
Here’s his frog in a stationary position, followed by the unraveling of five human bodies that make up the animal.
