The exhibition offers a complete vision of his dark and captivating world, through his most transcendental works and pieces, rarely exhibited, including the creations that are part of the contemporary art collection of the Fundació Sorigué.
Collishaw's work seeks to bring to light the darkest human impulses, trying to demonstrate that these will never overcome their basic instincts, regardless of aesthetic or scientific advances.
The beauty of Collishaw's work is convincing, seductive, captivating and hypnotic, but also repulsive as it incites the viewers to perceive the darkest fantasies of their interior.
The exhibition is structured in two subjects, each one exposed in one of the two wings of the Villanueva Pavilion, and which represent some of Collishaw's important obsessions: nature and history of art.
Description of project by Real Jardín Botánico
A special selection of the works of the British creator Mat Collishaw is presented for the first time in Spain since Saturday, March 30, at the Villanueva Pavilion of the Royal Botanical Garden. "Mat Collishaw, Dialogues" is the first exhibition organized by the Sorigué Foundation in Madrid. It is also the artist's first solo exhibition in Spain and offers a complete vision of his dark and captivating world, through his most transcendental works and pieces rarely exhibited, including the creations that are part of the contemporary art collection of the Fundació.
Through sculptures, photographs, films and installations of his last 20 years of career, the exhibition presents works that involve the public in a twilight world between the seductive and the disgusting, the familiar and the shocking, the poetic and the morbid. The beauty of Collishaw's work is convincing, seductive, captivating and hypnotic, but also repulsive insofar as it incites the viewer to perceive the darkest fantasies of its interior.
The exhibition, which can be visited until May 24, is structured around two areas, which correspond to the two wings of the Villanueva Pavilion where the exhibition is located, and which represent some of Collishaw's obsessions: the nature and history of art.
In the first area of the exhibition, the disturbing Collishaw pieces focus on works that start from nature, in a frame as close and special as the Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid. In their series Insecticide (2006-2014), butterflies are crushed and then enlarged to an exaggerated scale. The work captures their lifeless bodies, suspended in the darkness and, nevertheless, illuminated by the vibrant tones of their torn wings, beautiful and tragic at the same time.
Retrospectre, a dark and spooky curio cabinet
In this regard, Collishaw says that "it seemed to me that this was a very simple example of how a work can represent death: petit morte [...] records an act of violence, but at the same time produces some beautiful images." In another of the installations located in the exhibition, Retrospectre (2010), inspired by Sergei Parajanov's films, initially an improvised sanctuary is perceived, from which emerge scenes of animal sacrifices and stormy and apocalyptic landscapes. The work is transformed into a dark and ghostly cabinet of curiosities.
The second part of the exhibition Collishaw extracts and refers to the myth and history of art, often creating a contemporary dialogue with masters from the past to explore the dark side of humanity. Collishaw's complex works are based on iconic images of art history, cultural references that the artist squeezes into metaphors of contemporary society.
In this line, the exhibition establishes an interesting dialogue with works exhibited in the Museo Nacional del Prado. These works unite tradition and contemporaneity, but above all, they combine the inherent concerns of the human being over the centuries, such as the transience of life or the representation of horror.
All Things Fall (2014), a work described as "nothing less than a contemporary masterpiece" by the British newspaper critic The Sunday Times, Waldemar Januszczak, is based on the biblical story of the massacre of the innocent, combining ancient technology of the zoetrope with modern 3D printing. As the zoetrope moves around, the optical illusion engages and seduces the public before he realizes that he is accomplice in a scene of genocide.
Collishaw often addresses morally and politically compromised issues. In his photographic series Last Meal on Death Row, Texas (2011), he presents photographs in the manner of seventeenth-century Flemish still-life paintings to portray the last meals requested by inmates condemned to death. The emotional and psychological solemnity of each of these representations alludes to mortality, isolation and decadence.
Collishaw's work seeks to bring to light the darkest human impulses, trying to demonstrate that these will never overcome their basic instincts, regardless of aesthetic or scientific advances.
