Early modern art features a remarkable fascination with ornament, both as decorative device and compositional strategy, across artistic media and genres. Interestingly, the inventive, elegant manifestations of ornament in the art of the period often include layers of disquieting paradoxes, creating tensions - monstrosities even - that manifest themselves in a variety of ways. In some cases, dichotomies (between order and chaos, artificiality and nature, rational logic and imaginative creativity, etc.) may emerge. Elsewhere, a sense of agitation undermines structures of statuesque control or erupts into wild, unruly displays of constant genesis. The monstrosity of ornament is brought into play through strategies of hybridity and metamorphosis, or by the handling of scale, proportion, and space in ambiguous and discomforting ways that break with the laws of physical reality. An interest in strange exaggeration and curious artifice allows for such colossal ornamental attitude to thrive within early modern art.

Despite its longevity as a tradition stretching back to at least the eighteenth century, the Grotesque has only recently become a non-pejorative term in art and academia. "The Grotesque Factor" takes a close look at the evolution of the Grotesque, examining early caricature (Hogarth, Goya), abject, scatological and black humor, nineteenth-century French art and literature (Grandville, Baudelaire, Jarry), Jame Ensor, the grotesque in early film and the grotesque turn in recent British art. It includes 175 extraordinary works by more than 76 artists, including Francis Bacon, Louise Bourgeois, Otto Dix, James Ensor, Max Ernst, Jose Gutierrez Solana, Victor Hugo, Paul Klee, Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein, Rene Magritte, Man Ray, Franz Xavier Messerschmidt, Juan Munoz, Meret Oppenheim, Pablo Picasso, Richard Prince, Juan Sanchez Cotan, Antonio Saura, Thomas Schutte, Cindy Sherman, Leonardo da Vinci, Bill Viola and Franz West, among others.