You can’t handle the Naked Truth - Posters of nudes defaced outside Cork art gallery

It might be catalogued as ‘Anonymous (2018)’ because curators at one of the country’s leading galleries are unaware of either the identity - or the motive - of whoever is behind the ‘cover-up’ of a male nude in two promotional banners. 

Whether it is vandalism, graffiti, censorship, or just art, the unknown marker carrier applied their hand sometime over the weekend to the banners on the railings outside Cork’s Crawford Art Gallery, showing reproductions of Kilkenny-based artist Elizabeth Cope’s 2006 painting, Giraffe Man.

The banners are advertising one of the exhibitions running inside, ‘Naked Truth: The Nude in Irish Art,’ which has been attracting up to 1,000 visitors a day since opening two weeks ago.