The Naked Truth series provides a somewhat ironic perspective on the role of prostitution in the life and work of some of the greatest painters, in particular of religious and spiritual art, from the 16th to the early 20th century. It is a study of the dichotomy between the imagery, its religious or spiritual context and the circumstances of the works’ initial creation, which would have very likely been deemed immoral at the time. BeckerHarrison’s work was inspired by the transgressions of some of history’s most revered old masters. They examined some particularly iconic paintings for the circumstances surrounding their creation. The extensive use of the ‘world’s oldest profession’ in the personal lives of artists, but also in their work, is well documented. This was a rather pragmatic approach as it would have been nearly impossible to find female nudes who were not of questionable moral standing. Painters used both male and female prostitutes, some of them quite infamous in their time, even for important religious works. The idea for the Naked Truth series came about when a friend of the artists, himself a renowned renaissance art expert, was invited to a wealthy client’s house and treated to a live re-enactment of an old master painting – with nude prostitutes. BeckerHarrison decided to attempt this on their own. Their approach was to recreate classic works with real prostitutes but to go one step further: they used only men, all ladyboys, recruited in the brothels of Bangkok, where neither Christianity nor classic paintings were part of the culture. They worked with their subjects to stage a painting’s scene and then Carolin photographed them, creating a canvas for Simon to later add the elements required to complete a recognizable version of the original work. The work reveals and maintains the subjects’ features and characteristics, from beautiful to grotesque, but stays with the discipline of the original forms. The objective was not to recreate the brushstrokes of old masters but to update and reinvent their iconic imagery. They picked Caravaggio, genius and well-known troublemaker, wanted for at least two murders, who was said to have systematically used prostitutes as models for his paintings. And even used the body of a dead prostitute as a model for the Virgin Mary in a commission for the Catholic Church. Leonardo Da Vinci was famously accused of sodomizing a male model and scholars suggest that he regularly visited brothels for both male and female company and to recruit models. The famous anonymous portrait of Gabrielle d’ Estrees, an image alluding to the imminent birth of the illegitimate son of Henry IV of France, a devout Catholic, would have caused immense scandal at the time. In Ingres’ days the open depiction of ‘concubines’ was already accepted: La Grande Odalisque, a commission by the Queen of Naples, portraits a sultan’s concubine. By the late 1900s Klimt went further: he openly depicted nude prostitutes, pregnant girls and lesbians in a style referencing early religious icons, controversial in his day, and was accused of “the sexualization of iconography”. BeckerHarrison are an artistic team, Carolin a photographer, Simon a painter, illustrator and graffiti artist who combine their disciplines to create one seamless body of work.  Using a modern paint-on-photographic-print style, utilizing airbrushing, traditional painting and graffiti techniques they create images, which appear digitally altered but are actually just the result of a symbiotic collaboration between two complementary crafts. Their technique permits the creation of somewhat unlikely images, the fusion between a photograph shot during their extensive travels and painting back in their London studio. Previous series of BeckerHarrison’s work have focused on the effects of religious conflict and the hypocrisy of extremist belief in different religions. The Naked Truth continues their slightly blasphemous but humorous approach.