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‘The Return of the Prodigal Son (after Rembrandt)’ by Isaac Huggins
$2,900.00
Fibre-reactive dye, fabric ink and silkscreen prints on calico
Dark-stained wood frame
130 x 102 cm
Available to view in the Perth gallery
About the artwork
This artwork draws from Rembrandt’s biblical painting but moves away from its clear storytelling. Printed and dyed onto calico, the familiar scene is blurred and broken apart, leaving only traces of figures and light. The image feels distant, as though it is being remembered rather than directly shown.
Large screen printed letters, influenced by advertising and popular media, sit over the surface. They interrupt the quiet mood of the original subject and compete for attention, much like images do in everyday life. The work contrasts the intimacy of a historic painting with the bold, direct language of modern visual culture.
By reworking a well-known masterpiece in this way, Huggins reflects on how images from the past survive in the present—often altered, layered, and seen through new contexts. The piece suggests that meaning is never fixed, but shaped by time, reproduction, and the ways we encounter images today.
About the artist
Isaac Huggins is a multidisciplinary visual artist, curator, and arts educator based in Perth. Working across painting, printmaking, textiles, and installation, Huggins’ practice critically investigates the psychological effects of advertising and mass media, and the shifting boundaries between cultural capital and commodification.
His work often merges gestural abstraction with screen-printed imagery and typographic forms, appropriating both historical and popular visual languages to question dominant power structures. His process-based experimentation aims to evoke the fractured nature of contemporary media landscapes, as well as the dissonance between historical artistic legacies and the aesthetics of consumer culture.