The Gun & The Heart

Gangsters have been frequent guests in Pepperstein’s works since his early childhood drawings. Tracing his interest in the theme back to cinema, he describes them as “post-film characters.” Pepperstein’s gangster pointing his gun at the victim is a variation on “the man with a movie camera” facing the viewer. (Film title designer Maurice Binder brought this metaphor to life in the famous gun barrel sequence for the first James Bond film). Pepperstein’s gangsters are never armed with real guns: they carry toys or odd imitations of weapons, but toys that can help create a fairer world in the future. Building on a tradition that spans E. T. A. Hoffmann and the cult Japanese anime feature Akira, Pepperstein has chosen toys—strange mechanical aliens that break the normality of the adult world—as one of the key themes in his work.