Runner (Mom, Death, and Devil)

David Avery

David Avery pays homage and updates two master prints with his "Runner (Mom, Death, and Devil). The composition is akin to Max Klinger's mystical etching “Cupid, Death, and the Beyond”, plate 12 from “Intermezzos - Opus IV”, considered by many to be his most elegantly represented symbolist image.

Avery uses the face of Albrecht Durer's "Knight, Death and the Devil" for Death, facing a mother, who is jogging while pushing a baby carriage as she talks on a cell phone. Behind her is a satanic mismash, the Devil, represented by a bicycle with a skull and, like with Klinger's 'Beyond', a vague group of symbolic elements.

The jogging mother is about to run off the sidewalk, into a desolate landscape that does not bode well for her or her child if she does not gain consciousness immediately.