I am the one that brings meat back home
I am the one that brings meat back home / Аз съм тази, която носи месото вкъщи или It's gonna take a lot to drag me away from you/ Ще трябват много усилия, за да се откъсна от теб - mixed technique - pencil, silver oil, charcoal and acrylic on 300lb Fabriano Artistico paper
Size: 56 x 77 cm
Framed: 62 x 83 cm
Anton Terziev, 2021
Photo: © the artist. Courtesy of the artist
Featured in
Part of NTFL series (2019-)
Title credit: Svetoslav Todorov - journalist, editor and writer
After photography image of the Jamaican-American IFBB professional bodybuilder , winner of Mr.Olympia in 2018 , Shawn Rhoden (1975-2021) He died at 46 years old from a heart attack.
Unexhibited
Anton Terziev’s I Am the One That Brings Meat Back Home (pencil, silver oil, charcoal and acrylic on 300 lb Fabriano Artistico) confronts us with a brutally staged tableau: the fallen, hyper-muscular form of Shawn Rhoden lies prone like hunted game, while a youthful white woman, rifle in hand, offers a perverse trophy-pose. Terziev’s mastery of chiaroscuro—his layered graphite and charcoal sweeps—renders the bodybuilder’s sinews in almost sculptural relief, even as the metallic glint of silver oil underscores the mercenary gleam of spectacle.
This unsettling pairing collapses the boundary between predator and prize: Rhoden, once exalted as the pinnacle of physical achievement, becomes carcass under the gaze of triumphant conquest. The pristine Fabriano ground, marked by subtle washes of acrylic, evokes both gallery white-cube and slaughterhouse slab. In this tension, the work indicts the corrosive appetite of a society that devours its icons—athletic, racial, and corporal—while celebrating cruelty as entertainment. Terziev asks us: who truly feeds, and who is fed upon, when the body is both commodity and canvas?