Kurt Cobain’s ‘Incesticide’ Album Cover Painting to Make Public Debut

Nirvana lead singer's covert art to go on exhibit at Seattle Art Fair this summer.

June 30, 2017 5:00 am
Kurt Cobain Art for 'Incesticide' Cover Set for Seattle Art Exhibit
(DGC)

You may have had the album in your record collection for 25 years, but never wondered: who’s the artist behind the oddball cover of Nirvana’s Incesticide? (It looks like something that Salvador Dalí could’ve done.)

It’s actually none other than late Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. And now Cobain’s original cover art, along with another painting, and notebooks that the artist kept will be featured in a Seattle art exhibit at the United Talent Agency Artist Space from Aug. 3-6, during the Seattle Art Fair.

Kurt Cobain Art for 'Incesticide' Cover Set for Seattle Art Exhibit
(DGC)

“He was born near there, he passed away there, and he created the soundtrack for a counterculture there,” Joshua Roth, the director for United Talent Agency Fine Arts, told the New York Times. (It’s one of two paintings of Cobain’s that will be on display.)

One of the band’s more obscure albums—but certified platinum in 1995, no less—1992’s Incesticide is a collection of the band’s B-sides and rarities at the time, including three tracks from a 1990 session the band did with legendary British DJ John Peel on the BBC.

Below, listen to Nirvana’s distortion-laced cover of The Vaselines’ “Molly’s Lips” from Incesticide.

 

 

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