Santos vivientes

¿Tristes porque ya se llevaron de México a Yayoi Kusama?
(que bueno, el Tamayo parecía romería…)

Acabo de leer sobre este artista ingles llamado Michael Landy, que también trajo una expo a México donde toma íconos religiosas (santos y otra figuras del cristianismo), y los “robotiza”, creando desconcertantes esculturas cinéticas que se torturan y auto-flagelan por sí mismas (o con la ayuda de otros).
¿Muy sádico? Créanme ir al Tamayo  a ver a la hippie esa también era una tortura…

A series of large-scale kinetic sculptures bring a contemporary twist to the lives of the saints.

Saints are more often associated with traditional sacred art than with contemporary work, but Michael Landy, current Rootstein Hopkins Associate Artist in residence at the National Gallery, has been inspired to revisit the subject for this exhibition.

Landy’s large-scale sculptures consist of fragments of National Gallery paintings cast in three dimensions and assembled with one of his artistic hallmarks – refuse. He has scoured car boot sales and flea markets accumulating old machinery, cogs and wheels to construct the works. Visitors can crank the works into life with a foot pedal mechanism. 

Towering over you, the seven sculptures swivel and turn, in movements that evoke the drama of each saint’s life. Saints Apollonia, Catherine, Francis, Jerome, Thomas – and an additional sculpture that takes a number of saints as its inspiration – fill the Sunley Room alongside paper collages…

http://bit.ly/1ynweHG

Santos vivientes

Heavenly bodies

El fotógrafo Paul Koudounaris -famoso entusiasta de todo lo macabro- acaba de publicar un libro llamado “Heavenly bodies”, donde por primera vez se muestran  algunos esqueletos (presumiblemente, de cuerpos de Santos) extraídos de algunas de las catacumbas cristianas mas antiguas de Roma. Los cadáveres se presentan bastante bien conservados y en toda su grotesquidad. Si, a pesar de sus atribuciones “divinas” y de todas la joyas que los engalanan, nadie puede negar que con grotescos…

As the Vatican prepares to display bones it believes to be those of St. Peter, we explore an amazing series of jewelled saints’ remains from southern Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The skeletons were found in 1578 when some of the catacombs of Rome were opened up, containing the remains of the city’s early Christian community. Over the next couple of hundred years, some of the skeletons, identified as saints’ remains, were sent north across the Alps to replace relics destroyed in the Protestant Reformation. To mark their newfound status, they were festooned with an extraordinary assortment of jewels, cloth of gold and other precious fabrics, and are still objects of veneration. Paul Koudounaris tracked them down for his book Heavenly Bodies, published by Thames & Hudson and available through the Guardian bookshop…

http://bit.ly/1bBuJ9j