unique Art Gallery,Walsall
Massacred babies, death row meals, and bare statues doing appalling things to each other … Collishaw’s grisly works challenge arts relationship with violenceThe Massacre of the Innocents is one of western art’s most horrific themes. The slaughter of infants ordered by King Herod has been depicted among others by Bruegel as a war crime in a snowy village and by Poussin with an appalling intimate realism.
Now Mat Collishaw has turned it into an evil three-dimensional lively sculpture that swarms with cruelty and sadism under the arches of a enormous domed temple. It is as if Ray Harryhausen collaborated with the Renaissance sculptor Giambologna to create a monstrous battle of discontinue-go statues that near to juddering life and do appalling things to one another. Picture the scene in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad where Harryhausen makes a multi-armed statue near to life,a sword in every hand. Replace one statue with multitudes of bare fighting figures and you start to get close to the awful wonder that Collishaw has created.
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Source: theguardian.com