Press Release: Blain|Southern is delighted to present The Grinders Cease, an exhibition by Mat Collishaw, his first with the gallery in Berlin. The exhibition testifies to the depth and breadth of Collishaw’s practice, with new and recent works including installation, sculpture, photography and painting.
Collishaw is a key figure in an generation of contemporary British artists who came to prominence via the group show Freeze in 1988. He has never shied away from challenging subject matter, exploring ideas around death, destruction and decay. The artist is known for works that reference art history and create a contemporary dialogue with past masters.
The
Grinders Cease reflects his preoccupation with the vanitas theme, used
since the Renaissance as a way of reminding viewers of the impermanence
of worldly pleasures.The exhibition title is borrowed from the King
James Bible, Book of Ecclesiastes, from which the Vanitas derives. The
exhibition opens with a new work from 2018, Columbine, which animates
Albrecht Dürer’s watercolour study Columbine from 1526. This wild plant
is a multifaceted example of the transience of life, both in that it blooms only briefly and because the plant itself is poisonous.
The
exhibition continues through three separate light-locked spaces. In the
first, Albion takes as its subject the Major Oak in Sherwood Forest,
England. This centuries-old mythical tree has a hollow rotten trunk, and
since the Victorian era its vast limbs have been supported by an
elaborate system of scaffolding. Collishaw’s slowly rotating, almost
life-size image of the oak is a ghost-like apparition generated by both
cutting-edge laser scans and an antiquated technique of theatrical
projection. Empty at its core, the image represents a living object
which is trapped in perpetuity to present the illusion of life. The
title also partly derives from
the idealised concept of an ancient England that probably never existed.
Last Meal on Death Row, Texas is a series of photographs of meals requested by actual prisoners prior to execution. Presented in the manner of Flemish still life paintings they are a memento mori, a reminder of the
inevitability of death and the impermanence of life on earth.
Another series, the Black Mirror works, have another effect on the
viewer: capturing single figures whose forms have been subtly animated
to move behind a surveillance mirror framed in elaborate black Murano
glass, the works reflect the viewer’s image and thus draw a connection
between the past and present.
The
grand finale is provided by Seria Ludo, a 3D zoetrope
sculpture. This kinetic optical illusion rotates at increasing
velocity before strobe lights kick in and animate the scene,
revealing a frenzied chaos of debauchery. 180 tiny figures can
be seen carousing across the framework of the chandelier in a
manic, drunken orgy. This is a party, but a desperate one, and when
will it stop?
