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Showing posts with label bosch. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bosch. Show all posts

Tuesday, 17 March 2026

Artlyst: Bruegel To Rembrandt Drawing The Rise of Naturalism Compton Verney

My latest exhibition review for Artlyst is on ‘Bruegel to Rembrandt: Drawing Life, Sketching Wonder’ at Compton Verney:

'‘Patience’ shows naturalistic drawing utilised in the service of fantastical moral fables, while ‘Prudence’ shows the same style utilised in the service of realist moral fables. This shift from a focus on a fantastical demonic scene to a realistic rural scene in which, ‘as now, people look for a sense of control in times of uncertainty – preparing for harder days, these peasants store food and money, repair dilapidated buildings, and gather firefighting equipment’ – is part artistic, part social and part theological.

Religion plays a significant role throughout the changes explored and the genres displayed. An exquisitely illustrated 16th-century Flemish Book of Hours illuminates the relationship between prayer books and the depiction of everyday country life across the Netherlands in this period. However, a secularising element can also be seen, particularly when the Biblical content is minimised within an image to focus on the landscape in which the scene is set. An example of this tendency can be seen in Abraham Bloemaert’s ‘Landscape with the Prodigal Son’, where Bloemaert’s interest is mainly with the dilapidated house or barn against which the miniscule Prodigal leans and the living trees that the barn is built around.'


My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -
Monthly diary articles -
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De'Borah Powell - Open My Eyes.
Posted by Jonathan Evens at 18:24 0 comments
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Saturday, 24 October 2015

Impossible exhibition: New Hieronymus Bosch show

This is very exciting news - for an exhibition opening next February at his Noordbrabants museum in ’s-Hertogenbosch, Charles de Mooij has secured 20 of the 25 surviving panels by Hieronymus Bosch, 'including several reunited triptychs and the panels, that were scattered centuries ago, made for an altar still in the town, and 19 of the 25 drawings – a collection he believes will never be assembled again.' (The Guardian)

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King Crimson - Moonchild.
Posted by Jonathan Evens at 00:36 0 comments
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Friday, 13 April 2012

Howson does not shy away from the role that Christianity plays in his life and work

It will be interesting to see what the New York art scene makes of the upfront focus on Peter Howson's Christian faith in the press notice for his forthcoming Redemption exhibition at Flowers New York:
"His paintings are not academic or didactic in the style of history painting, but the sublimation of revelatory personal narratives. Religious overtures are proceeded by confession, as intimate details of the artist’s familial and spiritual relationships punctuate the parables of his urban imagination.

Howson does not shy away from the role that Christianity plays in his life and work. Through this spiritual guidance the artist emerged from inner crisis. The dramatic and dynamic paintings of Hades, which make up the majority of this exhibition, depict the struggle to find hope in the dark recesses of existence. They reflect the suffering of a modern war-torn and technologically obsessed world, yet a sense of salvation can be found within. Paying homage to Bosch and Brueghel, Howson crowds his canvases with figures of various shapes and sizes, including many familiar echoes from his previous works, writhing in agony and praying for redemption. This deliverance often appears as a radiant figure symbolizing the painter’s daughter Lucie, another major factor in his road to recovery. In the painting Outcast Howson has used impastos to render a tranquil Christ, surrounded by a group of pariahs in search of atonement. This image could be deemed disturbing for many, however as with a good deal of Howson’s paintings there is a question here as to whom is the real outsider."

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Deacon Blue - Bethlehem's Gate.
Posted by Jonathan Evens at 19:02 1 comments
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Wednesday, 24 June 2009

Absence of God - Raqib Shaw

Raqib Shaw’s paintings in Absence of God are sublime in all senses of the word.

In their scale and content, they reference the sublime apocalyptic works of the Romantic artists, John Martin and Francis Danby, which miniaturised human beings emphasising our powerlessness in the face of God and Nature as part of their exploration of the sensations of immensity, darkness and terror. Shaw uses similar methods – densely populated scenes set against backdrops of classical ruins – to engage similar sensations of decline and fall.

But Shaw’s paintings are also sublime in their technique and beauty. Working with metallic industrial paints, Shaw creates a marbling effect through use of a porcupine quill and outlines each detail of his compositions in gold. When glitter and gemstones are added to the mix the whole shimmers in a riot of colour, which although slightly kitsch, nevertheless is harmoniously blended towards beauty.

When combined with the monstrous content of Shaw’s works - the intense violent and sexual nature of its manga-like imagery – a bitter-sweet paradox is established which, in light of the exhibition’s title and his anthropomorphic imagery, could reflect a world of harmonies and beauty formed with intricacy and inter-connectivity yet red raw in tooth and claw.

Shaw draws on the works of Hieronymus Bosch in depicting the monstrous beauty found in the absence of God. He finds there a similar paradox; Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights also being Hell. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his sculpture Adam, which features a human figure with a bird’s head, its mouth and genitals swarming with parasites, mounted by a large, bejewelled lobster. Adam removes the monstrous from the beautiful and represents the fall of humanity into the bestial.

Shaw’s work in its focus on the monstrous and its referencing of past masterpieces has parallels with the Goya-based installations and vandalisations of the Chapman Brothers. However, the paradoxes that Shaw establishes through the beauty of his violent compositions seem to avoid the double negatives of, for example, the Chapman Brother’s Insult to Injury series where their defacing of Goya’s Disasters of War etchings seems to revere desecration and thus reverse the intent of Goya’s work.

Shaw’s paintings counter many of the stereotypical critiques of contemporary art. They are conceptual works requiring traditional painterly skills in terms of composition and technique. They are figurative narrative paintings which form abstract harmonious visual wholes. They are iconoclastic while referencing a broad multi-cultural art history. In short, they are sublime.

Absence of God, Raqib Shaw, White Cube Hoxton Square, 20 May – 4 July and Kunsthalle Vienna, 19 August – 27 September 2009

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David Byrne - Road to Nowhere.
Posted by Jonathan Evens at 15:06 0 comments
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