Hand-signed Silkscreen embellished with 24crt gold leaf by Johnny Depp.
Castle Fine Art is proud to announce Johnny Depp’s 2024 collection, Tarot. As an artist, Johnny Depp depicts captivating figures from his life, dreams and subconscious mind. In this collection, he has created four tarot-inspired artworks: ‘The Lovers’, ‘The Emperor’, ‘The Empress’ and ‘Strength’. While referencing the ancient deck, they are imbued with his own characters and narratives, and imagined in a uniquely symbolic style.
This collection, which follows on from The Bunnyman series, draws on tarot’s intriguing iconography. ‘The Emperor’ and ‘The Empress’ for instance, are both major arcana cards in traditional decks, reflected in the artist’s own regal interpretations of them as crowned rulers, while ‘The Lovers’, typically found nude, have been dressed in elegant formal wear. Another twist depicted by Depp for ‘Strength’, is the exchange of the lion for an elephant, symbolic to Depp for its intrinsic qualities.
A lover of the supernatural, Depp has long incorporated tarot into his life, exploring the history behind this centuries-old tradition. As he’s reflected, “I've always been tremendously curious about tarot… and there's a great art to the cards”.
Using tarot as a vessel for storytelling, Depp riffs on the established card format; within numbered black frames, his figures and creatures carry new meanings. He has compared this approach to the ways in which Beat writers, such as Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, would deconstruct sentences to build new ones in their ‘cut up’ series.
Depp also joins a rich tradition of artists playing with tarot in their studios. Leading Surrealist Salvador Dalí spent a decade designing his dreamlike pack, whilst the Mexican painter Leonora Carrington, imagined her deck with mythological creatures.
