Edgar Allan Poe once asked, "Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?" Had he lived in this century, he might have been referring to a subterranean netherworld in Beverly Hills dubbed the Galerie Morpheus. Opened in 1996, the six-room underground gallery is one of a handful in the world to feature surreal and fantastic artwork by such masters as Jacek Yerka, Wayne Douglas Barlowe, De Es Schwertberger, Zdzislaw Beksinski, Gérard DiMaccio, Sebastian Kruger (whose renowned celebrity caricatures have appeared in Playboy) and, most famously, H.R. Giger of Alien movie fame. "The gallery's paintings and sculptures range from the haunting and erotic to the spiritual and whimsical," says curator and publisher James Cowan.
Cowan founded Morpheus International in 1987 (with a $70,000 credit card loan) in order to publish an English-language art book of Giger's nightmarish but oddly erotic biomechanical visions. Two rooms in the gallery are devoted to the Swiss artist, one of which features a looming life-size Alien-head sculpture--as well as a head cast of Giger himself.
Unlike a lot of contemporary art (which Cowan insists "could be reproduced with equal facility by an astigmatic chimpanzee the morning following a prolonged drinking binge"), Galerie Morpheus works only with artists solidly grounded in the craft of painting. Most of the artists Morpheus nurtures are trained in Europe in the tradition of the Old Masters. In addition to the publishing and gallery operations, Morpheus licenses projects like a line of Giger figures for McFarlane Toys and a movie based on the popular book Barlowe's Inferno (director James Cameron calls it "an awesome visual work, taking us into a contorted landscape of the damned which Dante himself could never have imagined"). One could apply the same quote to the Galerie Morpheus itself.
