‘Modern Baroque’ is a contemporary take on the Baroque, its drama and its exuberance, explored through the work of two London-based artists: Daniel Hosego and Rebecca Stevenson.
Daniel Hosego looks at European art’s traditional fascination with Classical culture and transposes it into a 21st century context, replete with mobile phones, selfie sticks, billionaires, and the COVID virus. His works begin as finely detailed ink drawings that have echoes of Albrecht Durer but with a comic-book crispness and a baroque effusiveness, images he then scales up into unique screenprints on Perspex in slick Pop Art colourways. A Minotaur gazes distractedly into his phone as Icarus falls from the sky above a landscape studded with power stations and factories. A stag-headed Actaeon photobombs Diana and her nymphs while they are taking a selfie in a wooded grove. A baroque interior presents Artemisia Gentileschi’s ‘Judith beheading Holofernes’ as part of the #MeToo movement while Harvey Weinstein looks on in chains. And a demon, taken from the 15th century drawings of Martin Schongauer, plays Boris Johnson’s head like a bagpipe, while another Trump homunculus dances before a satyresque Jeff Bezos in a bacchanale based on the 2020 pandemic. Through his unique combination of high craftsmanship, sharp humour and a baroque sense of drama, Daniel questions the durability of art’s love affair with the Classical world.
Rebecca Stevenson’s sculptures reinvent baroque Vanitas, the memento mori so popular in the early modern era as a reflection on mortality and the transience of earthly things. Game birds, flowers, fruit, skulls: Rebecca reimagines them all in glorious technicolour as a cornucopia of exuberant flourishes. She works in wax, a medium that for centuries has been related to the body and to the ephemeral nature of flesh, and takes her animal motifs from Old Masters painters such as Jan Weenix and Jan Davidsz de Heem. Particular to this show is the motif of the swan as symbol of both creative elegance and corruptible flesh. ‘Melancolia’ depicts the swan hung upside down, its body billowing with bright fruit and flowers. The same motif appears as a group of marbled plaques, and as a smaller sculpture surrounded by exquisitely fine coral, a quintessential object of the early modern Wunderkammer as a symbol of youth and its fragility. Accompanying bronze sculptures feature skulls and doves to further the theme of a life that is finite but also flourishing. Wax and bronze, physicality and ephemerality: Rebecca’s work updates the timeless themes of the baroque Vanitas for a 21st century audience.
‘Modern Baroque’ opens on Thursday 9 June, 6:30 – 8:30PM. If you would like to receive the PDF preview catalogue shortly before the show opens, please register via the ‘Request PDF Catalogue’ link above.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Cookie | Type | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|---|
_wpfuuid | 1 | This cookie is used by the WPForms WordPress plugin. The cookie is used to allows the paid version of the plugin to connect entries by the same user and is used for some additional features like the Form Abandonment addon. | |
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary | 0 | 11 months | This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". |
cookielawinfo-checkbox-non-necessary | 0 | 11 months | This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Non Necessary". |
viewed_cookie_policy | 0 | 11 months | The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data. |
Cookie | Type | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|---|
CONSENT | 0 | 16 years 10 months 14 days 16 hours 18 minutes | No description |
Advertisement cookies help us provide our visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns.
Cookie | Type | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|---|
IDE | 1 | 1 year 24 days | Used by Google DoubleClick and stores information about how the user uses the website and any other advertisement before visiting the website. This is used to present users with ads that are relevant to them according to the user profile. |
VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE | 1 | 5 months 27 days | This cookie is set by Youtube. Used to track the information of the embedded YouTube videos on a website. |
Analytics cookies help us understand how our visitors interact with the website. It helps us understand the number of visitors, where the visitors are coming from, and the pages they navigate. The cookies collect this data and are reported anonymously.
Cookie | Type | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|---|
YSC | 1 | session | This cookies is set by Youtube and is used to track the views of embedded videos. |
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
Cookie | Type | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|---|
test_cookie | 0 | 11 months | This cookie is set by doubleclick.net. The purpose of the cookie is to determine if the users' browser supports cookies. |