I Didn’t Think We’d Have To Fight The Nazis
Acrylic on Canvas
60 x 90cm
2025
I painted this work in June 2025 to be part of my exhibition 'I Paints What I Sees, Sometimes I Paints The Future', although it was a reworking of an earlier painting from my show 'Some Reasons Why Things Have Become Horrible and Evil.
The most recent show was intended to have work which both reflected the current world and also possibly predicted the future, in the same way The Simpsons is often said to.
When I made the original painting the far right were gaining momentum across western politics, and when thinking about work for my last show it felt I could update my original idea.
In the past few weeks the work has become much more relevant and potentially even divisive, but it's strangely become another painting of mine which does seem to have alluded to future events.
This image is a re-working of a painting I made in 2019 with the same text and title. Since then though it seems that the far-right have taken even greater strides into mainstream view. Elon Musk, amongst others, did a Nazi salute, Kanye claimed he was a Nazi and many elections across the west saw a rise in popularity for the right. I wanted to remake this painting, not only to draw attention to some of the major influential figures in the far right and where they’re beliefs really lie, but also for the relevance of this text. It seems to me that these figures often reference World War II or talk of the toughness, or endurance of what is known as the ‘Greatest Generation’, however their actual views would fall much more in line with the facists that this generation, including my own Grandad fought against.
The work features U.S. president Donald Trump, reform party leader Nigel Farage, X and Tesla owner Elon Musk, far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (Tommy Robinson), Imperial Wizard of the KKK Thomas Robb, media executive and former investment banker Steve Bannon, German far-right politician Alice Weidel, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, far-right radio show host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, neo-Nazi, antisemitic conspiracy theorist and white supremacist Richard B. Spencer, far-right commentator and founder of the Proud Boys Gavin McInnes and rapper Kanye West.













