A Kind of Flying - The Invisible Hand

David Avery

Avery commented on this etching:

When I was working on a series of etchings based on The Four Disgracers by Hendrick Goltzius, I kept returning to the hand in his depiction of the fall of Icarus. This obsession ultimately became the basis for A Kind of Flying—The Invisible Hand, combined with a take on Goya’s mysterious etching from The Proverbs. Goya’s A Way of Flying provides no clue to interpretation, and efforts to connect it with political events for social commentary seem to fall short. I became interested in subverting these images to depict the consequences of Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the marketplace (so popular right now!), replete with riffs on the grotesqueries used so effectively by Hieronymus Bosch, to enhance the effect.