Geoff Ostling – Tattooed Man to donate skin to National Gallery

Mr Ostling’s skin was the subject of a three-part documentary series called Anatomy, which premiered at the Sydney Film Festival last year and was shown at the Tribeca film festival in New York earlier this year. Mr Ostling is featured in the first film in the series entitled “Skin” and is directed by Rhys Graham and examines the 25 year collaboration between tattooist/artist eX de Medici and himself and their negotiations in bequeathing his tattooed skin as artwork to the National Gallery after his death.

Ostling, in an interview with the Sydney Daily Telegraph, said:

“I wanted something unique, so I thought about a garden of plants, of natives and imported flowers, what you would find in a Sydney garden with a distant view of the city from Heartbreak Hill.”

On the subject of donating his skin to the National Gallery, Ostling has said:

“To donate skin is not the most amazing thing in the world but the tattoos are revolutionary. It has never been done as a whole body before and not in a gallery. People can be squeamish about it. Portraits painted on human skin hang in galleries around the world. They don’t tell you that, of course, and valuable books were also covered in human skin.”

As the National Gallery already contains some of eX de Medici’s canvases – they hope to display Mr Ostling’s skin as part of this collection after his death.

It remains to be seen whether this will ever happen.

Could this be an art exhibit at the National Gallery?