London’s Wellcome Collection opens an unusual exhibition showing works of art related to mortality, gathered by US antique dealer Richard Harris
Celebrating death is an odd concept for an exhibition, but a new show in London on the topic that many people would rather avoid is at times beautiful, macabre, harrowing, comforting and funny.
Death: A Self-Portrait opened at the Wellcome Collection, which specialises in scientific and medical themes, yesterday and runs until February 24.
It contains around 300 paintings, puppets, models, drawings and artefacts from the collection of Richard Harris, an American antique print dealer who just over a decade ago decided to dedicate his time to assembling works of art related to death.
He has around 2,000 items in total, most of them in storage, and would love to display the collection around the world to help people come to terms with their ultimate fate.
“My real aim is to have this show all over the world,” the 75-year-old said at a preview of the exhibition.
“All the world needs to continue to promote the discussion and dialogue about this just to make it... something that is not taboo and something that we cringe about and close our eyes and our minds to.”
With a broad smile and jaunty manner perhaps at odds with his chosen obsession, he added: “Like it or not, we’re not going to live forever.”
Curator Kate Forde organised the exhibition around five themes and sought to make the show feel as personal as possible rather than being a spectacle.
By placing artefacts from Japan and Nepal close to those from the US and Mexico, the exhibition underlines how different cultures deal with death in radically different ways.
Mexico, with its Day of the Dead holiday, takes a more head-on approach than cultures that seek to avoid the subject.
“It’s an acknowledgement that death is there, it is a part of life and there is a way still of connecting with the dead and that can be joyous as well as full of grief and sorrow,” Forde said of the tradition.
Among the most disturbing works on display are 51 prints by German artist Otto Dix, based on his time as a machine-gunner on the Western Front during the First World War.
Unflinching in their portrayal of agony, fear and rape, they are inspired both by Goya and Callot, whose works hang alongside them in the Violent Death section.
In Commemoration sits a “tau tau”, an Indonesian “grave guardian”, or wooden model of the deceased placed next to the graves of prominent members of the Toraja ethnic group.
The oldest item on display is the Nuremberg Chronicle, an illustrated adaptation of the Bible and world history from 1493, left open at an image of skeletons leaping and dancing frenetically beside an open grave.
The show also features works by contem-porary artists, including a 2009 giant “chandelier” made by British artist Jodie Carey, which is constructed
from some 3,000 plaster-cast bones.
(Reuters)