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Tuesday, 16 November 2021

Artlyst - Pablo Bronstein: A This-World Vision Of Hell

My latest review for Artlyst is of Pablo Bronstein: Hell in its Heyday at Sir John Soane's Museum:

'With this series, Bronstein is looking back at the world in which his own grandfather grew up and the technology that was prized at that time. He writes that the things that generated wealth and pleasure then ‘are now seen as responsible for much of the ruination and misery of the contemporary world’. 

Bronstein describes his panoramas as ‘a reinterpretation of the 19th and 20th-century glorification of technological and economic advancement’, ‘a bombastic cityscape in which the now misplaced optimism in ‘progress’ is drawn as hyperbole’ ... 

Not immediately and obviously an exhibition for the period of Cop26, this is, nevertheless, one that reveals our taste for the instant, excessive, tawdry, gaudy, flashy and swanky to be, not only kitsch and trivial, but also so seductively addictive that it has gradually yet inevitably led us to the edge of an environmental emergency which we, judging from the Cop26 negotiations, continue to only partially acknowledge and address. The unaffordable cost – the hellish expense – paid for our consumerist addictions is at the heart of this exhibition. Bronstein reveals us to truly be in the heyday of Hell.'

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -
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Gavin Bryars With Tom Waits - Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet.

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