So Beautiful It Hurts
23 October to 16 November 2019
We are pleased to present ‘So Beautiful It Hurts’, an exhibition exploring the boundary between beauty and horror through the work of three contemporary artists: Andrew McIntosh, Carolein Smit, and Rebecca Stevenson.
Andrew McIntosh’s paintings take the motif of the haunted building and embed it with artworks representing humanity’s grandest experiences. Behind a decrepit shopfront, Zurburan’s St Francis in meditation and ecstasy hang against a backdrop of storm clouds; a defunct factory on the Spanish coastline hosts a statue of Poseidon from antiquity, symbolising the awesome wrath of the sea. And in a grubby window of an old block of flats, Cranach’s ‘Venus and Cupid’ hangs dejected, its grand themes of love and faith forgotten and gone to seed. Turbulent cloudscenes hint at the tradition of the Sublime and its view of the grandeur of Nature as terrifying, but in Andrew’s work this is all tempered with the banality of everyday decay. Divine wrath and realism, the awesome and the ordinary: Andrew packs them all together with a surreal and foreboding beauty.
Carolein Smit’s ceramic sculptures roam the depths of myth and folklore to bring its cast of characters into the light. Through looking at timeless archetypes, the nature of the ‘beautiful’ becomes secondary to the resonance of the idea. But her works are beautiful, exquisitely so, in their intricacy and jewel-like finish. In this show is a pair of life-size sculptures referencing Gods and monsters from antiquity – what were once figures of awe and terror. The female echoes the Artemis of Ephesus, one of the principal cults of the ancient world, but converted into a Medusa covered with writhing snakes. The male is a wounded warrior, cloaked in a bearskin as if in an animal spirit, sporting finely-worked armour akin to tattoos that tell the stories of his triumphs. By combining the grotesque with the exquisite Carolein’s sculptures explore how discomfort and amazement can co-exist without contradiction.
Rebecca Stevenson’s sculptures reference the Dutch still-life tradition and painters such as Jan Weenix to explore the macabre potential of beauty. In particular, she extracts specific elements – game, fruit, and flowers – that were intended to provoke reflection on the transience of life, and recreates them with heightened aesthetics and in improbable combinations. Rebecca’s method involves casting her animal sculptures in layers of resin and wax, and then incising them like a surgeon, peeling each layer back to create a cavity to host her cornucopia. In contrast to the sombreness of the 17th century, her wax modelling is lush and bright, the sugarfrost coating almost sickly sweet. In her bronzes she takes the kind of curlicues that were thought to enchant the viewer and prompt awe, and replaces what should be cherubs with the heads of rabbits and game. The result is an investigation of the Baroque obsession with mortality, reinterpreted for the 21st century.
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. |
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. |
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. |