Group exhibition Heavenly Creatures

– Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg [Villa Kast]

Heavenly Creatures is an exhibition of figurative painting that visually runs the gamut. Investigating style, source, technique, image, and metaphor, artists today conjure enigmatic realms with Romantic associations.

At the conflux of all things related to Pop culture and film (magazines, music, literature, Internet, etc.,) mythological narrative, fantasy, eroticism, cynicism, animation, and dream-like imagery predominate. Historical painting with its qualities of direct observation get acknowledged, distilled, and discarded.

Director Peter Jackson's 1994 movie of the same title loosely inspires this show. His film in turn is inspired by the true-life story of two adolescent girls who commit murder. The film merges fact and fiction to lead the viewer into a complex character study. Which part of the film is fantasy and which is fact? Or at what point do they bleed into each other further altering our perception of this parallel world?

Such constructions of fantastical worlds, uncanny spaces, and broad narrative forms, often reveal our fascination and connection to the dark, the strangely absurd, and, ultimately the mysterious.

Through stratums of representation the artists in "Heavenly Creatures" hover between local and global, past and present, and East/West hybrids.

In today’s world technological innovation seems to consume us all who yearn to know and do more in less time, and faster. As a subtext of living a sense of foreboding and doom permeates the culture. Our icons have failed us, from celebrities, to clergyman, to politicians and athletes. Yet in contemporary art there exists a dogged attempt at reconciling the polarizing influences surrounding us. How does one find truth amidst chaos?

A recent lecture at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt discussed some of these matters as related to New Romanticism in contemporary art and the artists search for an “ideal world”. Such longing for paradise, magic, and beauty is born out of this “information-age romanticism”, as I like to call it. What can artists do with such knowledge culled from an overdose of source material extracted out of the material and virtual?

Threading many periods and having many perspectives, the charged nature in much of the figuration in “Heavenly Creatures” is a response to images of war and terror, and the deterioration of nature. These are pictures that engage the emotions while evolving out of our well-informed coolly detached image data bank. They are as cynical as they are hopeful.

[Quelle: https://web.archive.org/web/20251110083531/https://ropac.net/de/exhibitions/475-group-exhibition-heavenly-creatures/]

Rita Ackermann, Hernan Bas, Katherine Bernhardt, Munro Galloway, Max Henry (Kurator/in), Hideaki Kawashima, Tracy Nakayama, Tam Ochiai, Paul P., Lisa Ruyter (Kurator/in)

Objects

(Archival material, Publications)

2004 Information: Ausstellungssommer 2004 (Archival object)
2004 Programm: Kunst in Salzburg. Sommer 2004 (Archival object)
2004 Einladung: Heavenly Creatures (Archival object)
2004 Information: Heavenly Creatures (Archival object)