The Space Cowboy
The Space Cowboy, whose real name is Chayne Hultgren, is an Australian performance artist known for his incredible feats of sword swallowing, escapology, and other dangerous stunts. He was born on December 12, 1979, in Byron Bay, New South Wales, Australia.
Chayne Hultgren gained international recognition as The Space Cowboy due to his astonishing and often death-defying performances. Some of his notable feats include sword swallowing, fire eating, body skewering, and various escape acts. He has set several Guinness World Records for his accomplishments, further solidifying his status as a remarkable performer in the realm of circus and sideshow arts.
Throughout his career, The Space Cowboy has traveled the world, performing at various events, festivals, and television shows. His acts are not only visually captivating but also highlight his dedication to pushing the boundaries of human capability. He has often combined his performances with elements of comedy and storytelling, engaging audiences on multiple levels.
Recently exploding into the visual arts scene The Space Cowboy’s unique work’s going to collectors around the world. “I paint with bold emotion and a high-speed wet overloaded brush style, using gravity to drain the image. My art presents a monochrome duality to express a balance between life and living and death and dying with a daring glint.” With 20million+ YouTube hits and fans around the world The Space Cowboy undoubtedly leaves a lasting impression. The primary objective of his extreme performance and edgy visual art is to inspire people to push their boundaries and challenge ‘the norm’ with the message ‘What the mind can conceive the body can achieve’.
Electrifying colors vibrate off the canvas infused with an undeniably vivacious energy. This is the work of the Space Cowboy. Bold gestural brushstrokes and splashes of acrylic paint are met with sharp angular lines, the glaze of oil sticks, and diffused fields of spray paints. With his hand, he uses these mediums to synthesize the figurative and abstract into one cohesive re-imagining of what he observes in the everyday. The dark and expressive nature of the early modern artists like Vincent Van Gogh and Francis Bacon are combined with the intense fast applications of paint channeling the great Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock evoking the Space Cowboy’s background as a performer. These all meld together with hints of inspiration taken from Jean-Michel Basquiat, Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Cy Twombly, Banksy, and more.
The dynamism of his work extends beyond the canvas. Hidden in plain sight, his works come to life through interactive and immersive Augmented Reality experiences. Displaced into new surreal environments, we witness as the Space Cowboy manipulates form and color blurring the lines between real life and the absurd. In this signature styling, we see a plethora of subjects emerge before us. A dark humor saturates his contemporary plays of classic mythologies, famed fairy tales accented with eye-catching allusions to popular culture, explorations of anatomy and the foundations of life, and even works bordering on the autobiographical referencing his own experiences as a performer. There is something primordial, elemental, speaking to each of us as these aesthetically exhilarating images illuminate the unseen connection between us all. They transform into visual metaphors for the greater universal lessons of our world, encouraging us to look deeper into ourselves.