The British artist Philip Colbert, known to nearly everyone as "Mr. Lobster," is a leading figure of New Pop art, and carries the affectionate nickname "Andy Warhol's godson" within the art world.
Mr. Lobster has been hard to miss this year. His giant inflatable lobster has turned up in Venice, Rome, Los Angeles and Seoul, and in early November it appeared in the outdoor section of the West Bund Art & Design fair in Shanghai. Not long before that, Colbert's first major solo show in China, "Lobster Metropolis Dreaming," opened at Massimo De Carlo's Shanghai space, with nearly thirty large new works completed in 2022, spanning painting, sculpture and new media.
Yitiao Art spoke with the prolific artist remotely about his "lobster kingdom." "When I became a lobster, I became an artist," is how Colbert sums up his own practice. Why a lobster? By his own account, the strange chemistry between him and lobsters goes back to early childhood. He was born in 1979 in a small seaside town in Scotland.
As a child playing on the beach, he came across a lobster, and something about the encounter stayed with him.
"I felt like this lobster had some kind of telepathic power, like it was from outer space, and my job was to make it a bit more human," he said. The image never left him; it kept splitting and growing in his mind. He met lobsters again and again while studying art history — in the Dutch still lifes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, thick with lobsters, and in Dalí's lobster objects from the twentieth. He couldn't get enough of either.
More important, he gradually came to feel that the lobster carried a kind of built-in surrealism. In his work, he wanted to play the lobster as a character in its own right — a surreal protagonist dropped into the contemporary human world, needling and amusing his way through ordinary life. Ten years on from his first lobster painting in 2012, the character has only grown fuller, and Colbert's "lobster kingdom" has only grown larger with it. At "Lobster Metropolis Dreaming," visitors get a 360-degree, fully immersive dose of the lobster world — lobsters of every size, shape and color, flat and sculptural, the eye practically bombarded with pattern and color; even the wallpaper is covered in lobsters.
The artist designed every pattern on the gallery walls himself; had it not been for the pandemic, he would have flown in from the UK to paint the walls in person. On canvas, his lobsters seem to have crawled straight into the frames of museum masterpieces, running wild among a crowd of art-historical icons. Andy Warhol, Basquiat, Takashi Murakami, Dalí, Roy Lichtenstein, David Hockney, Francis Bacon, Keith Haring, Man Ray — all of them show up somewhere in his ongoing dialogue with art history.
Colbert told us in the interview that he has always been fascinated by art history. "For me, art is a language, and the art of the past determines what artistic language we speak today. Any contemporary artist who takes part in that conversation is contributing something new to the language." His lobsters also ride distorted horses off on hunts, in scenes that can't help but recall Rubens.
The artist says he's drawn in particular to the tension that comes from two opposing forces pulling against each other.
"It feels like it stands in for the clash of different artistic theories, viewpoints, tastes," he said. The lobsters' own "star wars," though, don't look bloody at all — they're almost cute. A robotic lobster from the future travels through a screen to Planet Lobster, and a full-blown civil war breaks out.
"Planet Lobster is an extension of the lobster world. The robots and artificial intelligence stand in for a future, science-fiction version of the lobster," he said. Four floral canvases in the show, with their arrangements of blossoms in saturated fluorescent pink, purple, yellow and orange, call Andy Warhol's best-known work to mind immediately. Colbert told us the flower paintings are a direct homage.
"I've always loved his iconic flowers, and the way he drew inspiration from magazine advertisements." In Colbert's paintings, the flowers of the lobster kingdom look almost like 3-D toys, or like a cactus caught in bloom.
The single most eye-catching work in the show is an inflatable lobster installation that fills an entire gallery on its own. Mr. Lobster himself, dressed in a bright yellow suit, sits hugging his knees with a faintly melancholy air, surrounded by a ring of food — green grapes, lemons, oranges, pickled olives, cheese, red and green apples arranged on blue-and-white porcelain plates — a vivid restaging of an eighteenth-century Dutch still life.
Mr. Lobster told us, half-joking, that this might be "the largest still life scene in the world." Beyond drawing out the relationship between contemporary pop culture and the history of art, the artist also meant the installation as a tribute to Claes Oldenburg, the veteran Pop artist who died earlier this year.
Over a career spanning more than half a century, Oldenburg was known for turning everyday objects into oversized soft sculptures. "I love the idea of inflating a scene like this," Colbert said. "It has nothing to do with the tone of the historical still life, and yet it pumps fresh life into that classic genre." Colbert's "Lobster Painter" series doubles as a kind of self-portrait — in these canvases, the lobster holds a pencil, a paintbrush, a tube of paint, dabbing away with great seriousness.
The most emotionally affecting painting in the show is the only one set against a gray-white ground: a self-portrait of the lobster, alone in a room. It stares dumbly at a sparking, broken light bulb, one claw pressed to its chest in a gesture of helplessness, looking thoroughly forlorn. The melancholy in that single painting seems to carry an echo of the isolation of being shut indoors during the pandemic.
At the entrance to the exhibition stands a lobster in a pink-and-blue octopus helmet, claws raised as if to strike — it looks like it could be made of rubber, but it's actually cast entirely in painted stainless steel.
Mr. Lobster brought seven sculptures to the show in total, all sharing a common thread: a bright red, anthropomorphic lobster dressed in various "outfits" — a hamburger, a tin of Spam, a poisonous mushroom, a painter's smock. The lobster reaches its big claws out from inside the costume, its expression somewhere between resignation and irritation, as if registering both curiosity and confusion about the world around it.
Over the years, the artist has produced a whole line of wearable art — dresses shaped like hamburgers, trash cans, tins of Spam.
"What I really wanted was to take those wearable pieces and remake them as sculpture, recast onto the body of the lobster itself," he said. The lobster world, in other words, maps onto the real one. The largest sculpture in the show, nearly three meters tall, stacks four lobsters on top of one another like acrobats in a human pyramid. One green "lobster king," hoisted to the very top, strikes a triumphant pose — the artist's way, it seems, of giving visible form to the class hierarchies that go largely unnoticed in contemporary society.
The lobster has long since made its way out of the gallery, too. In November, at the outdoor section of the West Bund Art & Design fair in Shanghai, a giant lobster dropped in wearing a blue suit, looking endearingly clueless. Over the past two years, Colbert's inflatable and large-scale lobster sculptures have made their way to Venice, Gstaad, Rome, Scotland, Bermondsey, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Seoul, Taipei, Shanghai, Changsha, and more.
Some sit on rooftops, some float on water, some stand in front of ancient castles, some hang over busy city streets — always with that same expression, gazing out at this chaotic, glittering world: helpless, innocent, faintly curious.
"Mr. Lobster" and his family of four now live in London. His wife, Charlotte, is herself an artist and filmmaker, and the couple have two young children.
"Maison Colbert" sits in Spitalfields, in east London, a neighborhood dense with historic houses — some dating back to Roman times — and long a magnet for artists drawn to its distinct character. The couple restored the exposed brick walls of their old building themselves, and painted flowers and vines by hand across the old wooden ceilings. Colbert's freewheeling visual style spills over into the house itself: lobsters turn up everywhere, on chairs, on the bed, in the paintings on the wall, in sculptures, in the lamps.
Even the elevator door handle is a golden lobster, and the door itself is painted "lobster red." Beyond lobsters, the house is full of another recurring motif — eyes — which come from Charlotte's hand. She has a deep interest in fairy tales and the occult, and to her mind the eye carries a kind of hidden, protective power. The couple have built a home as dreamlike as something out of "The Grand Budapest Hotel," and, perhaps surprisingly, they also share a single studio — an arrangement that, for two artists who each need real independence to think and work, amounts to something like a genuine love letter to one another.
Mr. Lobster also had an artist friend paint formal portraits of the two of them. Colbert says they've found a way to work independently without disturbing each other when they need to, and to collaborate seamlessly when they don't. "Charlotte's work is usually black and white — visually, our styles are very different. But we're interested in a lot of the same things, and we know each other's DNA, so to speak. We help each other."
This past April, Colbert launched a large-scale lobster NFT project, sending the lobster into the virtual frontier. The set comprises 7,777 lobsters, each dressed in different outfits with different accessories — many of them costumed as other cartoon characters, pushing the Pop aesthetic to its limit. Buying one is a bit like opening a blind box: you never know in advance whether the lobster NFT you end up with will be sporting an afro or camouflage fatigues.
In the metaverse, Colbert has also built out an entire "Lobster Metropolis" — miniature lobster versions of the Guggenheim, the Met, an opera house, a factory, a bar, a convenience store. This lobster-ified rendering of a real city is both a precise distillation of how digitally saturated contemporary life has become, and the artist's own speculation about the shape of life to come.
Behind the lobster shell, there's also a critique of consumerism and of the restless pace of contemporary life. Colbert, in fact, isn't a classically trained artist at all — he switched into art after finishing a master's degree in philosophy. Asked about his working rhythm, he said he prefers a fairly regimented schedule, usually working from ten in the morning to six in the evening.
Outside of work, he always travels with his iPad, "because you never know at what odd moment inspiration is going to strike — especially on a plane or a train, which can be the perfect place to disappear completely into your own thoughts and drawings." He wants the exaggerated forms and vivid colors to seize the viewer first, like a blade, and only afterward invite them to look again at what's underneath — something, he believes, far weightier than the light, playful images on the surface would suggest.
The lobster is famous for its extraordinary lifespan, and is often taken as a symbol of vitality. Since becoming a lobster, Colbert says, he has embraced the freedom of art — and with it, the freedom to rebuild and reinvent his own subjective world.
"It's precisely that freedom that made me an artist." Editor: Huang Xirui. Copy editor: Ye Li. Images courtesy of Massimo De Carlo and the artist's studio.