Fig. 6 The Wounds of Christ. Courtesy Wallspace
A heart struck with razor blades and needles and a cast of a child’s skull are two of the provocative sculptures that will be unveiled in a new City of London gallery on March 7, until April 4 2007.
Another run of the mill modern art show? You might think so, until you find out the gallery is inside a working Anglican church.
The works are by none other than Damien Hirst, whose show New Religion has been chosen as the inaugural exhibition for the unusual gallery space.
The gallery, Wallspace, at All Hallows on the Wall Anglican church, has been established as a spiritual home for visual art, and will certainly pack a few punches with its launch display. Artist Hirst is synonymous with pickled sheep and dissected sharks, medicine cabinets and pharmaceutical imagery.
The Sacred Heart. Courtesy Wallspace
“There are four important things in life: religion, love, art, and science,” said the artist. New Religion highlights the conflict between two of these – science and religion.
“People tend to think of them as two very separate things, one cold and clinical, the other emotional and warm and loving,” he said of the two concepts. “I wanted to leap over those boundaries and give you something that looks clinical and cold but has all the religious, metaphysical connotations too.”
The result is a mixture of reinvented iconography in the form of silkscreen prints and sculptures. The works are intended to echo a fresco cycle, moving from the Creation of the World, through the Stations of the Cross to the Last Judgment.
A cedar cross studded with gem-like pills stands on an altar, with the silver child’s skull and heart sculpture wrapped in barbed wire and pierced with syringes and razors. A large carved marble pill stands in for the Eucharist.
The Skull Beneath the Skin. Courtesy Wallspace
Behind All Hallows’ altar hang three new paintings by Hirst, inspired by the church’s striking interior.
In the 50 prints on show, images of pills – in particular common painkillers – are given titles that subvert their meaning and call into question the certainties peddled by both science/medicine and religion.
Miracles and prophecies are likened to the drugs with curing properties, while beliefs are underlined as a means of obscuring the transience of life (for example in the images of skulls and of a butterfly). A print relating to the Book of Genesis presents cold medicines as ‘Preparations for the Flood (everything on earth is to perish)', and depictions of capsules and pills are given the titles of individual saints.
The Holy Trinity. Courtesy Wallspace
The setting of the exhibition is sure to provoke debate.
“For as long as people have been searching for God, or exploring the sacred, they’ve also been making art,” said Meryl Doney, Director of Wallspace.
“Wallspace is an exhibition space that showcases the diversity of contemporary work, exploring the relationship between art and spirituality – this is not a neutral space or a white cube. Which is why we invited Damien Hirst to show New Religion,” she said.
“I believe there’s a vigorous and open conversation to be had with this provocative and serious work.”
