Divine Comedies

Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’ from 1321 described a journey into some of the darkest recesses of the imagination, visualising a structure to Purgatory and Hell through which the reader could travel and eventually emerge on the other side. Much mythology and folklore does a similar thing: they use a story or a theatrical journey to make the frightening more manageable. ‘Divine Comedies’ looks at this use of theatricality in art as a means of confronting dark themes, through the work of two contemporary artists: Iain Andrews and Carolein Smit.

Carolein Smit is a Dutch artist renowned for her jewel-like and often disturbing ceramic sculptures. Her works delve into the treasure trove of mythological and religious imagery that has accumulated over the centuries, and drags its characters out into the light with vivid resplendence. The works in this exhibition present a host of figures emerged from the infraworld. A giant bulldog in a globular golden collar slathers like an infernal guard dog. A skeleton winds its claws around a young woman in a deathly embrace in Death and the Maiden. A shaman peers out from a bearskin, his legs tattooed to look like medieval European armour. Carolein’s sculptures are not limited to the macabre, but also explore eccentric legends from world history. A borometz, the ‘lamb of tartary’ said to grow from a plant, is imagined here as a spring-like character with echoes of the Lamb of God. A Hadrian’s Arm bound in rope appears as if unearthed from antiquity; a giant bezoar stone, said to heal ills and act as an antidote to any poison, is mounted in gold and platinum like a royal sceptre. These are sculptures that echo the power of magical charms, amulets on the journey through the dark.

Iain Andrews is a British artist whose paintings flow between figuration and abstraction, between a sense of recognisable order and a chaotic loss of control. Iain works as an art psychotherapist with young people and is interested in how established images and stories can serve as a containing structure to the maelstrom of trauma. In particular he looks at fairytale, myth and Old Masters paintings, which have for centuries been a way to explore ideas visually in a contained way, much like in a theatre. In the light of the current horrors in the Middle East and Ukraine, several works in this exhibition have a particular focus on a descent into the underworld. ‘Gehenna’, the New Testament term for the divine punishment, sees a painting of figures writhing in a storm of reds and purples, a theme similarly explored in ‘Inferno’ and ‘Dante’. ‘Purgotary’ appears in more earthly tones, the puce hues of the underworld only fleetingly appearing. A crossing of the River Styx echoes small boat crossings to new uncertain realms. But it is in the largest work that Iain’s themes are given full rein. ‘The Creation of Eve’ at monumental scale suggests the transformative power not just of narrative journeys but of the material of paint itself, and of how archetypal narratives articulated through artworks can still speak to our current troubled times.