Between: hirst

Showing posts with label hirst. Show all posts

Tuesday, 4 February 2025

Artlyst: The Art Diary February 2025

For my February Art Diary for Artlyst I begin with exhibitions by artists I’ve followed and whose work I’ve written about. These include Peter Howson, Jonathan Anderson, Barbara Hepworth and Theaster Gates. Then, I highlight the fascinating work and career of Steve Whittle, who is currently exhibiting in my parish in Essex. Following that is the mention of exhibitions catching my attention for the themes they explore, from experimental poetry to conversation and protest, environmental concerns, and nature. I end by highlighting essays and interviews I’ve undertaken recently covering artists such as Damien Hirst, Steve Whittle and Alastair Gordon:

"Buildings are among the many works that Gates has created and they also feature significantly in ‘In/Dwellings’ by Jonathan Anderson, an exhibition at the Dal Schindell Gallery. Anderson is the Eugene and Jan Peterson Associate Professor of Theology and the Arts at Regent College, Vancouver. I interviewed him for Artlyst in 2018 on the religious inspirations behind modernism. The interview was in relation to his co-authored book ‘Modern Art and the Life of a Culture’. His latest book, ‘The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art’, is due to be published by the University of Notre Dame Press in March–April 2025."

For more on: Peter Howson (see here, here, and here); Jonathan Anderson (see here); Barbara Hepworth (see here, here and here); Theaster Gates (see here); and Alastair Gordon (see here).

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

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NeedToBreathe - Carry Me.

Friday, 10 January 2025

Image: In the Face of Death: Damien Hirst and the Thrill of Mortality

Image Journal issue 123 is now available. This issue includes an essay I have written entitled 'In the Face of Death: Damien Hirst and the Thrill of Mortality':

"How we deal with death and what happens after, if anything, are among the central themes of the great religions, while how we live with the knowledge of that fate is one of the ethical conundrums we each face. Hirst’s work, therefore, has been ethically and religiously engaged from the get-go. In addition to his central focus on the inevitability of death, Hirst explores our efforts to prolong life, including the paradox that we kill other creatures as food in order to survive, the preservation and decay of bodies, death threats, and how we live in the light of our mortality."

The cover of Issue 123 features the work of Josh Tiessen, from a series of narrative, “hyper-surreal” paintings that explore the sources of wisdom, human and otherwise.

As the Image team put the winter issue together, they noticed several themes emerging. You’ll see candles, time-worn scraps of paper, and a set of images they think of as “Eden after the fall.” There are several gardens—some that are havens, others that reflect the world’s troubles—and marriage with all its beauties and difficulties, including sex, companionship, aging, and illness.

In her first editorial as editor in chief, Molly McCully Brown weaves these strands together. You’ll also find a surprisingly theological interview with a stand-up comedian, a documentary film about a dress made of nettles, a grandmother who is mysteriously knowledgeable about Cuban art history, and more.

For more of my writings on Damien Hirst, see my VCS exhibition entitled 'Fishers of People' and my Artlyst review of his 'Natural History' exhibition from 2022.

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Scott Stapp - Weight Of The World.

Monday, 28 October 2024

Visual Commentary on Scripture: Fishers of People

I'm delighted that my third exhibition for the Visual Commentary on Scripture has just been published and can be found at Fishers of People | VCS (thevcs.org).

This exhibition uses Damien Hirst's 'Isolated Elements Swimming in the Same Direction for the Purpose of Understanding (Left) and (Right)', John Bellany's 'Kinlochbervie', and Paul Thek's 'Fishman in Excelsis Table' to discuss Matthew 4:12-22 and Mark 1:14-20. These artworks give us what is essentially a collage of the kingdom whereby we are invited to imagine the kingdom of God as a body of water in which Christians are immersed and through which they are raised.

My first exhibition for the VCS was Back from the Brink on Daniel 4: 'Immediately the word was fulfilled upon Nebuchadnezzar. He was driven from among men, and ate grass like an ox, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven till his hair grew as long as eagles’ feathers, and his nails were like birds’ claws.' (Daniel 4:33). In the exhibition I explore this chapter with William Blake's 'Nebuchadnezzar', 1795–c.1805, Arthur Boyd's 'Nebuchadnezzar's Dream of the Tree', 1969, and Peter Howson's 'The Third Step', 2001.

My second exhibition is A Question of Faith and explores Hebrews 11 through the paintings of New Zealand artist Colin McCahon. McCahon is widely recognised as New Zealand’s foremost painter. Over 45 years, his work encompassed many themes, subjects and styles, from landscape to figuration to abstraction and an innovative use of painted text. His adaption of aspects of modernist painting to a specific local situation and his intense engagement with spiritual matters, mark him out as a distinctive figure in twentieth-century art.

The VCS is a freely accessible online publication that provides theological commentary on the Bible in dialogue with works of art. It helps its users to (re)discover the Bible in new ways through the illuminating interaction of artworks, scriptural texts, and commissioned commentaries. The virtual exhibitions of the VCS aim to facilitate new possibilities of seeing and reading so that the biblical text and the selected works of art come alive in new and vivid ways.

Each section of the VCS is a virtual exhibition comprising a biblical passage, three art works, and their associated commentaries. The curators of each exhibition select artworks that they consider will open up the biblical texts for interpretation, and/or offer new perspectives on themes the texts address. The commentaries explain and interpret the relationships between the works of art and the scriptural text.

Find out more about the VCS, its exhibitions and other resources through a short series of HeartEdge workshops introducing the VCS as a whole and exploring particular exhibitions with their curators. These workshops can be viewed here, here, here and here.

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Newsboys - Fishers Of Men.

Tuesday, 29 March 2022

Artlyst: Damien Hirst The Visceral Reality Of Death

My latest review for A rtlyst is of Damien Hirst: Natural History at Gagosian Brittania Street:

'God Alone Knows, Our Father Who Art In Heaven, and The Incomplete Truth have been grouped to form a crucifixion tableau with the dove of the Spirit above the central crucified sheep while a shorn sheep clutching a rosary and the Book of Common Prayer between its hooves kneels in the place of the grieving Mary or John at the foot of the cross. Exhibited separately, these are works that have sometimes been called profane and which can be understood in relation to themes other than the strictly religious ... Grouped together, as is the case here, these works exhibit a greatly increased sense of the hope that Christians see in the violent sacrificial death of God. Hirst once said, to Sean O’Hagan, the afterlife is a ‘phenomenal idea’. However, for me, it is the poignancy of expression on these crucified creatures that reminds of the once-for-all nature of Christ’s sacrifice, the sense that our violent actions and intentions are shown to be self-defeating – a literal dead-end – because by scapegoating and crucifying the Son of God there is nowhere else that our violent natures can possibly take us.'

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

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The Clash - The Sound Of Sinners.

Monday, 16 July 2018

Sacred Noise at Christie's

Sacred Noise explores themes of religion, faith and divinity in post-war and contemporary art through 30 works shown at Christie’s until 21 July. The exhibition seeks to chart the reinterpretation and subversion of these themes in the 20th century.

The starting point for Sacred Noise is the permission granted through Christ’s incarnation to depict the divine in human form which developed in the West in the direction of realism. The humanism of the Renaissance represented a significant move within this development. Keith Walker has written that ‘The Renaissance was the period when man and the world were re-discovered … Previously the artist was considered only a maker. God alone created. In the Renaissance man’s Godlikeness was asserted.’ Luis de Morales’ Ecce Homo variations showed Christ alone and at close range, blurring the boundaries between the human and the divine, then the vivid tableaux vivants of 16th-century Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbarán, gave the faithful a sense of direct access to the scenes he depicted.

While there is work included by the likes of Lucas Cranach the Elder and Sir Anthony van Dyck, the exhibition, once it has established realism as the primary mode of Christian expression in the West, is then keen to arrive at the beginning of the modern period to show how the European legacy of religious painting was reborn and redefined in post-war and contemporary art.

The argument made is that the wide range of work on display in Sacred Noise makes clear that, if divinity was long the anchor of human existence, its artistic unmooring in the 20th century has opened up endless new interpretative horizons. These interpretive horizons involve a move from realism to expressionism, abstraction and conceptual art while engaging with the sense that nothing is considered sacred — or scandalous — any more, the idea that art, science and money have come to supplant religion in the West, and the rejection of a divinity that leaves us tormented, forsaken and horrifyingly alone in a godless world.

Francis Bacon, Lucio Fontana, Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst and Maurizio Cattelan are cited and shown as being just a very few of the artists who shook the canon through their engagement with religion. However, there are issues with this selection of artists and with the argument made here through their work.

Firstly, the response of these artists is more nuanced in regard to religion than the exhibition allows. Bacon said that he could find no other subject as valid as the Crucifixion to embrace all the nuances of human feelings and behaviours that enabled him to think about all life’s horror. For Fontana, his Fine di Dio series rejected earthly images of God and symbolised instead the apophatic God, ‘infinity, the unfathomable, the end of figuration, the principle of the void.’ From the early 1980s onwards, religious imagery surfaces in Warhol’s art with his confronting of his own mortality giving way, as the exhibition catalogue states, to an interest in redemption and salvation. Biblical references also come to feature in Hirst’s art through his sense that the Bible has ‘great stories’ which ‘you can use … to fnd out what your life actually amounts to, in the end.’ Cattelan states that, as one who grew up singing in the church choir, his work is not anti-Catholic, but a way to ‘open people’s eyes to the faux sensibility of a culture where nothing is really considered either sacred or scandalous anymore.’ The work of these artists does not simply indicate the death of God among artists or society, as this exhibition, at points, wishes to suggest.

Secondly, the exhibition seems to make clear that this argument is only sustainable through its selective choice of artists. Of those 20th century artists exhibited here, only Eric Gill and Stanley Spencer are artists uniformly acknowledged as those creating from the inspiration of their faith. Yet a different selection of artists – Arthur Boyd, Marc Chagall, Maurice Denis, Makoto Fujimura, Albert Herbert, David Jones, Colin McCahon, John Piper, Georges Rouault, Gino Severini, Betty Spackman, Graham Sutherland, Paul Thek, Vincent Van Gogh, among others - could easily result in an exhibition to support the argument that the relationship between art and faith has been relatively close and positive in the modern period.

Themes of religion, faith and divinity have pervaded art throughout the centuries. The 20th-century did see the reinterpretation and subversion of those themes. Yet, the rebirth and redefinition of the European legacy of religious painting includes much that is affirming of religion, in addition to much which challenges its basic premises and history. This exhibition has more of the latter than the former. I would suggest that, at present, the story of art which has continuity with de Morales, Zurbarán and Cranach is the road less documented and therefore, because of its hidden treasures, is currently the more interesting story to tell.

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Good Charlotte - Beautiful Place.

Monday, 4 September 2017

Vision: exhibition launch reception

A reception to launch commission4mission's Vision exhibition was held tonight at St Stephen Walbrook.

During this reception commission4mission Associate member, Wendy McTernan, gave a talk entitled ‘Interpretations of the Cross in Contemporary Art & Culture’ and exploring images by Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and Andre Serrano, among others.

In today’s secular society, it is perhaps surprising that artists still find themselves drawn to the Christian cross as a means of expression. The cross has never been an event about which one can remain neutral; from the start it was an offence. Contemporary artists’ interpretations have taken many forms.

Wendy looked at some examples and shared how, in unexpected and sometimes shocking ways, Jesus’ story becomes part of theirs – and ours. commission4mission’s AGM was also be held at earlier in the day.

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Jeff Buckley - We All Fall In Love Sometimes.

Saturday, 6 May 2017

Art of Faith: A City Walk

Together with fellow commission4mission member Mark Lewis, I have been involved in researching the Art of Faith walk, recently produced by the Corporation of London with the support of the Diocese of London. This walk enables walkers to discover contemporary works of art in the City’s historic churches, including work by Henry Moore, Damien Hirst and Jacob Epstein.

The City of London has the greatest concentration of historic church buildings anywhere in the country. In the 16th century there were 111 churches in the City. 80 were destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666 with 51 subsequently rebuilt under the direction of Sir Christopher Wren. Today there are no fewer than 42 historic churches situated within the Square Mile, all of which are either Grade I or Grade II listed, and together they illustrate an extraordinary breadth of architectural history.

Less well known is the extent to which they contain significant examples of art commissioned from the 20th century onwards. Many of the churches in the City were damaged by bombing during World War II, providing opportunities in the post-war reconstruction to engage with contemporary art. These artworks are by prominent modern artists such as Jacob Epstein, Patrick Heron, Damien Hirst, Henry Moore, John Skeaping and Bill Viola, as well as work by other reputable artists such as Thetis Blacker, John Hayward and Keith New.

The Art of Faith walk is the second Art Trail created through the work of commission4mission. The first was for the Barking Episcopal Area and was researched and developed by commission4mission member, artist and Fine Arts lecturer, Mark Lewis. Again, a leaflet (Barking_Art_trail) publicises the Trail and provides information about the featured artists and churches. The leaflet includes a map showing the churches featured on the Trail together with contact details, so that visits to one or more churches can be planned in advance.

Mark Lewis’ brief was to research commissioned art and craft in the Episcopal Area from the past 100 years. While stained glass is the dominant Ecclesiastical art form, he was also concerned to show a diversity and variety of media and styles within the selections made. He highlighted works such as the significant mosaic by John Piper at St Paul’s Harlow and the striking ‘Spencer-esque’ mural by Fyffe Christie at St Margaret’s Standford Rivers. Churches with particularly fine collections of artworks included: St Albans, Romford; St Andrew’s Leytonstone; St Barnabas Walthamstow; St Margaret’s Barking; St Mary’s South Woodford; and St Paul’s Goodmayes.

The Art Trail for the Barking Episcopal Area also inspired Revd David New from Worcester to put together his own informative Art Trail leaflet about Thomas Denny‘s stained glass work focusing on churches in the Three Choirs area – Gloucestershire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire.

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Van Morrison - Contemplation Rose.

Tuesday, 14 July 2015

Sculpture in the City 2015

The popular public art exhibition, Sculpture in the City, returns this summer with a selection of contemporary art pieces in and around the Square Mile.

Sculpture in the City is a unique collaboration between the City of London Corporation (the elected body which looks after the Square Mile global business district around St Paul’s), local businesses and the art world, providing the opportunity to engage new audiences with established and emerging contemporary artists.

Set amongst London's iconic architectural landmarks, such as the Gherkin by Norman Foster and the Lloyd’s building by Richard Rogers, this open air exhibition draws visitors into the City transforming the EC3 insurance area. Watch CNN's short film or the Sculpture in the City 2014 film for an overview of the project.

The exhibition includes works from internationally renowned artists: Ekkehard Altenburger (Germany); Bruce Beasley (USA); Adam Chodzko (UK); Laura Ford (UK); Damien Hirst (UK); Shan Hur (Korea); Folkert de Jong (Netherlands); Sigalit Landau (Israel); Kris Martin (Belgium); Keita Miyazaki (Japan); Tomoaki Suzuki (Japan); Xavier Veilhan (France); and Ai Weiwei (China).

In its fifth year, Sculpture in the City aims to enhance our urban environment with cutting-edge contemporary works from leading artists sited in both busy thoroughfares and quieter, green spaces.

Where can I see the artworks? View this location map of the artworks. What other sculpture can I see in the City? Discover more public art and memorials in the Square Mile and click here to find out about modern art which can be seen in the City's churches (including work by Patrick Heron, Damien Hirst, Henry Moore, Bill Viola and others).

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Lovin' Spoonful - Summer In The City.

Tuesday, 7 July 2015

Modern art in City churches

'The Priory Church of St Bartholomew the Great contains a number of artworks by notable artists. Some of these are temporary loans, while others are permanent commissions.'

'Damien Hirst's statue of St Bartholomew, known by the title Exquisite Pain is back at St Bartholomew the Great and will be on loan to the church for the next few years. The statue is in the South Transept at the foot of the steps up to the South Doors. The statue is unmissable, but is doubly arresting because it is fully gilded . It grabs your attention even in dim light, and when the sun hits it, the effect is literally dazzling.'

'The artist Sophie Arkette created Colloquy for an exhibition at the Temple Church as a response to the ongoing celebrations of Magna Carta. This remarkable work is now on loan to the Priory Church, and its various parts have been positioned around the building in what is only a first attempt to find the right location for each. The glass elements are etched with text, which is both illuminated and distorted by the effects of light – both from candles that are in some cases lit within the element, and the light from sources around the building – and water, which is also included within parts of the work. Sophie Arkette worked in conjunction with Alan Freeman of Parndon Forge, and Jon Lewis of Orbic Glass in creating Colloquy. The glass etching was undertaken by Norfolk Resists.'

Aude Hérail Jäger's Enmeshed includes 'two large drawings Enmeshed I and Enmeshed II currently on loan at St Bartholomew the Great. Enmeshed illustrates human beings' interwoven-ness with each other and/or their story. The biblical theme of the Lamentation has fascinated Jäger for some years. In ordinary circumstances the group surrounding Christ would argue, plot, come together, fight, shout, laugh, etc. The Lamentation is the one moment when everyone and everything comes to a still-stand around the dead Christ. The figures become welded together and their cluster is the embodiment of grief. Both drawings also encompass recurrent themes in Jäger's work, such as the family and the theme of descending-ascending. In addition they are based on a new working method, which uses observational drawing in National Museums to extract particular aspects from Old Masters' work, which are then appropriated and transformed in large-scale drawings in the studio.'

Also on loan is Richard Harrison's Golgotha; 'rich in colour and texture with generous lashings of paint, which ebb and flow on the canvas reflecting turbulence and ... violent upheaval.' Harrison’s paintings have content which is often 'exaggerated by the vigorous and robust handling of voluminous layers of paint adeptly manipulated to create a dynamic expression of form and colour which resonate all-over the canvas thus underpinning the powerful emotional and visionary themes.'

'Alfredo Roldan was commissioned to paint an altarpiece of the Madonna and Child. In February 1999 it was unveiled in the Lady Chapel and dedicated by the Lord Bishop of London. Roldan aspires to embrace those major Avant-Garde moments of the early 20th century, which has defined his understanding of colour and shaped his application of form and composition. Without apology he acknowledges the influence of Matisse and Picasso and also Modigliani for his elongated portrayal of the female nude. And yet, like all genuine and honest painters who recognise the importance and significance of those historic revolutionary styles, Roldan has assimilated each derivative influence to create his own personal and very distinctive style of painting.'

A further permanent artwork is Josefina de Vasconcellos' terracotta The Risen Christ. De Vasconcellos was active as a sculptor from the early 1920s. As an artist she followed her own individual path, always believing that sculpture had a role to play as an inspirational force in society. In her extraordinary life she faced many challenges and disappointments, yet, sustained by her sincere Christian beliefs, managed to continue working into great old age. Versions of her best-known work Reconciliation now stand outside Coventry Cathedral, in the Hiroshima Peace Park, at the site of the Berlin Wall and in the grounds of Stormont Castle, Belfast. Many of her other works are in churches, cathedrals and private homes throughout the UK and overseas.

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Paul Mealor - A Tender Light.