Two Rats

Artist Kurt Novak (American)

Date1980

MediumWood, cardboard, canvas, paint, metal and rat poison

Dimensionsapprox. each: 7 × 11 × 10 in. (17.8 × 27.9 × 25.4 cm)

ClassificationsSculpture

Credit LineGift of Dennis Nawrocki, 2018

Object numberUAC6601

DescriptionKurt Novak, Two Rats, 1980. Wood, cardboard, canvas, paint, metal and d-con (rat poison)

With much of his work depicting humans, objects, and animals within his surroundings, Kurt Novak is a self-described realist. Having attended Wayne State University and worked within the second generation of Detroit’s Cass Corridor artists, Novak’s reality is an evolving cityscape characterized by the same grittiness felt and expressed by his predecessors.

Two Rats is darkly comical in its portrayal of a tiny piece of the Detroit ecosystem. Each rat is crafted with industrial materials such as cardboard, metal, and bits of wood; as if street debris tumble-weeded together to create the poorly regarded pests. They represent the lowest tier of the urban food-chain; a constant within cities around the globe. Novak pays them an endearing kind of reverence, using strips of canvas to build up the bodies of the football shaped rodents, not unlike tiny mummies. Both are steeped in a bath of d-con, like an ironic sort of preservative that gives nod to their rather inglorious deaths. The edgy aesthetic employed by Novak is heavily inspired by the Cass Corridor artists before him, who were often drawn to cycles of decay as well as the sensibilities of abstraction. Two Rats is no exception, appearing through Novak’s manual weathering like fossilized relics that might be excavated at the base of an abandoned home. In this way, Novak tosses the humble street rat into the limelight, as if to share the extraordinary discovery of the rulers of the underbelly of the city.

Written by Samantha Hohmann

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