“Masquerade: Norbert Kox
Author: David Damkoehler
In 1992 Norbert H. Kox inherited a framed print, a portrait of Christ that had hung in a prominent position in his parents’ home in Green Bay, Wisconsin. This portrait was to inspire a series of skillfully executed works that exploit visual and textual puns to illustrate Kox’s deeply sceptical attitude towards organised religion.
Before he became an artist Kox worked on custom cars and motor bikes and was a member of the Outlaws biker gang. A former heavy drinker and drug user, he renounced alcohol and drugs in the mid-seventies at the age of thirty, when he ‘hit bottom’. After briefly joining a Pentecostal Christian group, he began to study the scriptures intently, concluding that organized religion produced a false understanding of Christianity that could only be surmounted by deep personal study of the Bible. …”
