Floodgate Companion

Robert Beatty

Floating World

Floodgate Companion is Robert Beatty’s debut monograph, a cosmic and immersive collection of artwork from the renowned album cover artist.

Robert Beatty is best known as the artist behind those drippy, trippy, technicolour sleeves donning your favorite albums by Tame Impala, The Weeknd, The Flaming Lips, Neon Indian, Oneohtrix Point Never, Mort Garson, Tim Heidecker, Kesha, Real Estate, and in illustrations for The New York Times, Surfer Magazine, The New Yorker, Jacobin, and Oxford American. Taking aesthetic cues from airbrushed cosmic album art and avant garde animation of decades past, Beatty updates the style utilizing an idiosyncratic combination of digital and hand drawn techniques resulting in a timeless feel.

Created alongside a vast body of album cover and illustration work over the span of several years, Robert Beatty’s Floodgate Companion presents a parallel reality of unpublished artwork recalling the heyday of paperback science fiction, experimental animation, and outsider private-press psychedelic records. A cosmic and immersive artifact, Floodgate Companion is a gateway into a familiar yet alien world of imagined sci-fi novels and unheard music, shifting stylistically through airbrushed grotesques, abstract comics, and psychedelic op-art collages framed in asemic type.