Styrofoam, 2021
Kirsten Thys van den Audenaerde
Instantdreams
Pop band Cigarettes After Sex has tapped Belgian photographer Kirsten Thys van den Audenaerde for the cover of its new single “Twizzler,” bringing one of the artist’s most recognizable photographs to a global audience.
The artwork, Styrofoam (2021), is a photograph depicting a figure in fishnet tights draped across a sofa. Since appearing as the cover image for the band’s latest release, the work has circulated widely online, drawing attention for its sexually suggestive imagery as well as its surreal composition.
According to an interview van den Audenaerde did with her gallery, Instantdreams, the photograph emerged spontaneously during a shoot with her longtime muse, Rosemary. While photographing in the model’s home, the artist became drawn to the combination of a sofa, a sheepskin throw, a hanging lamp, and the fishnet tights her subject was wearing.
“I just envisaged a slightly absurd image of the legs showing and not the rest of her body, almost as if a doll was lying there,” van den Audenaerde told the gallery. The resulting photograph, she added, came out “exactly how I had imagined.”
The title Styrofoam emerged from the artist’s own reading of the image. “I imagined a styrofoam mold in two parts that you could open, and you would have these perfectly shaped legs and behind encased in it,” she said.
Van den Audenaerde’s practice centers on analog photography and frequently explores themes of intimacy, sensuality, and the human body. Ambiguity, she said, is central to her work. “I wanted people to look at the image and be a bit confused, so that they would take their time to look again and maybe come up with their own interpretation.”
The request from members of Cigarettes After Sex came as a surprise. “I had always hoped one of my images would make it as a cover for an album,” van den Audenaerde said. “I assumed it would be a small band I had never heard of. So when it was a big band that I was also a fan of, I was quite speechless.”
The collaboration also continues Cigarettes After Sex’s longstanding engagement with art photography. The cover of the band’s 2017 self-titled debut album featured a detail from Man Ray’s surrealist photograph Anatomies (1929).
Artists’ work has long helped define musicians’ visual identities, from Andy Warhol’s banana for The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967) to Gerhard Richter’s painting Kerze (1983), which appeared on Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation (1988).
