Illma Gore, the artist who drew Trump's micropenis: "Let's face it, we have a dictatorship in the United States."

Wearing a beanie and a sky-blue sweater that barely reveals her neck tattoos, Illma Gore appears on the other side of the screen, bringing the Brisbane winter with her. A few months ago, she moved to the east coast of Australia, where she was born, to get away from Los Angeles, where she has lived most of her life. "I intend to go back and forth to the United States if I don't get stopped at airport security every time. I'm on a list because of my work about Trump ..." the artist sighs.

Since 2016, he's been a target of radical extremists, receiving waves of insults, threats, and even a physical assault when he was just 24 years old: in Los Angeles, a man stopped his car, got out, and simply punched him in the eye. The reason for such anger? A drawing of a naked Donald Trump with a micropenis that Gore posted on his social media during the presidential campaign under the title "Make America Great Again ." Now he's once again stripping the president—and some twenty other politicians and dictators—to turn him into a grotesque, weeping cherub, an apocalyptic angel.

With another more than explicit title , Apocalypse Now , a cross between the prophecies of Saint John of the Cross and the hell of Coppola's film, Gore presents his first exhibition in Spain, at the Imaginart gallery in Barcelona , where it can be seen until September 18. As a prologue, it opens with the drawing of Trump naked, censored in the United States and exhibited by the Maddox gallery in London in the midst of a media storm (incidentally, it was bought by the Catalan collector Tatxo Benet ).

“I wasn't well-known then, just starting my artistic career. I was 23, taking art classes at university, and that drawing changed my life ,” Gore recalls. “The day after I posted it, they'd closed all my accounts, even disconnected my internet service provider. I received notices of legal action if I didn't take it down… I was actually scared,” she admits from the Antipodes, where she lives quietly, perhaps too quietly. “Australians are pretty apathetic. Politically, it's pretty boring. I want to keep going to Los Angeles to fight against this dictatorship. Because let's face it, we have a dictatorship in the United States,” she maintains.

An apocalypse, like her exhibition? Like an altarpiece, the centerpiece is an immense two-by-four-meter canvas, Death of Eros , populated by 25 angry, chubby little angels fighting each other against a dark, stormy sky. "I tried to represent current politics, of the 20th and 21st centuries, in a classical style, as they did in the Renaissance. Love has become myth, myth has become propaganda, and finally, propaganda has become violence, " notes the artist, who spent more than 100 hours painting her apocalyptic cherubs. At first, it's even hard to recognize the distorted faces of a disparate cocktail of political figures: Erdogan, Hitler, Che Guevara, Pol Pot, Kim Jong Un, Bashar al-Assad, Obama, Merkel, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, Queen Elizabeth II, Putin...

Are we at the beginning of the end?

There have always been wars. In Africa, the Middle East, Ukraine, and Russia... But for a long time, a cold, emotional civil war has been brewing in America. Trump's first presidency stirred up a lot of uncertainty, but by the end, it all seemed like a joke. However, now it's starting to feel as if he's been setting it up to actually unleash an apocalypse.

He has been left with a canvas full of dictators.

Yes, the result is very autocratic. That wasn't even my intention. I wanted to represent the leaders of the modern world, and the reality is there have been many dictators, like Mugabe in Zimbabwe, Duterte in the Philippines, Pinochet in Chile...

And why include Gandhi or Martin Luther King among them? Even Pope Francis!

It was important to show the whole spectrum, the image of the world as it is. Even Gandhi sparks controversy. He's shown fighting with Winston Churchill: he led India's independence from the United Kingdom and believed in nonviolence. The English revere Churchill for winning wars. As for the Pope... religion is very important in the US, and I wanted to represent him in some way. But if you look closely, none of the figures make eye contact. No one looks at each other. Perhaps if they did, they'd begin to understand each other a little more, to humanize each other.

And Hitler in the center?

The painting focuses on the West. Hitler wasn't just responsible for one of the largest genocides in history. His actions caused a butterfly effect that extends to the current conflict between Israel and Palestine. I also think about racism in the United States... There are two Americas, the white and the black. Both exist culturally, as if they were their own countries. Many people believe in racist or fascist ideas, repeating and regurgitating things that Hitler started. And then you see history repeating itself.

Also reserve a spot for Elon Musk...

He's the only unelected political figure. Musk represents the oligarchy that dominates politics in America. A few rich people with tons of money are controlling everything. I thought it was interesting to put the richest man in the world there. I was tempted to paint Rupert Murdoch and Bill Gates. I'd paint all the billionaires! Even if they sued me.

Illma Gore has experience dealing with pressure from the most powerful law firms, such as that of the LVMH group (Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy). In 2017, the artist once again stole the spotlight with her peculiar sculpture Loo-uis Vuitton WC , a golden toilet covered in the leather of French handbags that she sold for $100,000. On Tradesy—a luxury Wallapop now owned by Vestiaire Collective—Gore bought 24 secondhand handbags and a Vuitton suitcase for $15,000 to create a luxury toilet as a critique of capitalism and voracious consumerism. She did so a century after Duchamp placed La Fontaine, a nondescript urinal, in a museum.

"They threatened to sue me, they intimidated me by claiming there were fake bags, they pressured me to remove it... They even asked me why would anyone create a $100,000 toilet when there are children dying of hunger in the world!" laughs the artist. Some facts: the pumpkin-shaped jewel bag that Yayoi Kusama designed for Louis Vuitton in 2012 was worth $110,000, but in a recent 2023 the firm broke all records with the million-dollar Millionaire Speedy bag created by Pharrell Williams and worn by celebrities such as Rihanna and LeBron James.

But not all of Gore's works are as media-friendly or controversial—quite the contrary. In 2016, he drove to the Mexico-Arizona border to plant a white fence, one of those idyllic ones Americans have in their gardens, on a stretch where Trump's wall, over six meters high, had not yet been built. In the middle, he placed the typical For Sale sign. American Dream. "It's one of my favorites, a piece of peaceful protest. I built it in a hotel room. A friend accompanied me to install it just as the patrol cars were making their rounds. I wanted to put up a kilometer of fence, but we didn't even get halfway there," he says.

In early 2017, she unveiled a massive protest mural at the Samuel Freeman Gallery in Los Angeles, painted with blood donated by activists and artists. The painting depicts migrants and indigenous people sewing the American flag, a version of Henry Mosler's classic canvas , *The Birth of the American Flag *, which is housed at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

Before the Trump effect, her first canvas was her own skin with "My Body is Yours," which explains her overdose of tattoos—more than 5,000. She was barely 22 when she invited any stranger to pay $10 to choose a tattoo for her, whether it was a word (she sports dozens of strangers' names) or an image. While it may seem eccentric, there's a deeper reason behind it. "Is it okay if I get a little sad but explain the truth honestly?" she asks.

It's been dark for hours in Brisbane, and she shares her story: "I moved to Los Angeles when I was very young, and both of my parents died. I was orphaned, living on the streets for a while. And... I was violently raped by two men [here there's a pause and inflection in her voice]. It's the reality of being a homeless teenager. I was 14. Soon after, I got my first tattoo, and it was very liberating. I spent years thinking about how I could make the most original piece for myself, how to reclaim my body as my own. By tattooing other people's stories, I reclaimed it."