Art by Vladimir Gvozdev, 2008, all rights reserved

Madness seems to be a theme of cabinets of curiosities. This is certainly the case when considering Russian painter Vladimir Gvozdev's depictions of mechanical animals. They repurpose the visions of a German mechanic who lived in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century. Says Gvozdev, "After Germany's defeat in the First World War, the mechanic went mad and was held in a lunatic asylum for life. There he began inventing vergeltungswaffe, a German term for ‘vengeance weapons.' I never saw his blueprints, but I liked the story so much that I tried to make via my blueprints a sort of portrait of the inventor himself-to create a little museum out of the mind of that German mechanic." Now a Russian's re-imaginings of a German's ideas reside within our conceptions of a British doctor/collector's cabinet of curiosities…