A Slovenian artist’s stone sculpture is the cover art for The Cure’s new album
A stone carving by Slovenian artist Janez Pirnat caught the eye of musician Robert Smith and became the cover of the British band’s latest album, ‘Songs of a Lost World’, released earlier this month. While working on this studio material, the band’s first in 16 years, Smith flipped through an artist monograph he had previously been given. He was immediately drawn to the artwork, as he confesses to NME. The head emerging from a stone became the album cover. What captivated him was a sculpture entitled “Bagatelle” by Janez Pirnat. Over a career spanning more than five decades, Pirnat is said to have created some 2,000 sculptures, many of which depict faces materialized from stone. The artist – who studied architecture and sculpture in the 1950s and exhibited extensively in Eastern Europe – had a particular fondness for the material. In 2021, when Smith tried to contact Pirnat to ask permission to use the sculpture for the forthcoming album, he learned that the sculptor had died – on the same day the musician had discovered his work. “It was a very strange coincidence that cemented the idea that this should be the album cover,” says the musician.
The work, given to the band’s lead singer
The artwork is enigmatic, and this feeling is heightened by the way its image has been handled by Andy Vella, the artist who has been creating the band’s album covers since 1981. “My interpretation was to turn it into something solid. I envisioned it floating in space, almost like a distant relic from a forgotten time; a floating force that resists any kind of gravity,” Vella explains to Artnet. He collaborated with Smith as well as Ben Parker from Bournemouth University of the Arts. The graphic designer placed the object in the middle of a deep, dark space for the cover of Songs of a Lost World. Using 3D mapping, the artwork was digitally animated to look like a strange asteroid spinning through the cosmos. The image of the sculpture was also used, wearing various textures, for the covers of the singles “Alone” and “A Fragile Thing”. After Robert Smith contacted the artist’s widow to ask permission to use the ‘Bagatelle’ image on the cover of The Cure’s new album, she gave the work to the singer and it now resides in his home.
