Not Without My Ghosts: The Artist As Medium
t’s a ghost! And a naughty one at that. The apparition floats up, sprouting faun-like forms and wicked faces in what resembles a cloud of opium smoke. This vision, in a drawing by the early 20th-century British occultist Austin Osman Spare, emanates from a creature at the bottom of the page, whose hand is hard at work between his thighs. Another work by Spare, in this exhibition about “mediumistic drawing”, blossoms with spectral faces and devilish beings surrounding a nude youth in ecstasy.
Spare is fantastic, like an even more depraved Aubrey Beardsley, taking the fin de siècle master’s luscious graphics into seedy and deranged territory. For Spare seems to genuinely believe he has Seen Things. His art was championed by the occult leader (his followers hate it when you say satanist) Aleister Crowley. The demons Spare portrays have an awful reality…..
See full at : The Guardian
Press Release
From spiritualist practices of communing with the beyond, to Surrealist experiments with automatism, the exhibition builds a genealogy of artistic engagements with the supernatural, the subconscious and the otherworldly, from the 19th century visionary art of William Blake and Georgiana Houghton to the contemporary responses of Sigmar Polke and Susan Hiller.
Featuring the work of Robert Barry, William Blake, Cameron, Bonnie Camplin, Ann Churchill, Ithell Colquhoun, Louise Despont, Casimiro Domingo, Madge Gill, Madame Fondrillon, Chiara Fumai, Susan Hiller, Barbara Honywood, Georgiana Houghton, Anna Mary Howitt, Victor Hugo, Augustin Lesage, Museum of Black Hole Spacetime Collective, Pia Lindman, Ann Lislegaard, André Masson, František Jaroslav Pecka, Grace Pailthorpe, Olivia Plender, Sigmar Polke, Lea Porsager, Austin Osman Spare and Yves Tanguy.
Curated by Lars Bang Larsen, Simon Grant and Marco Pasi, Not Without My Ghosts is a Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition developed in partnership with Drawing Room. It will travel to Blackpool, Sheffield and Swansea later in the year.
Not without my ghosts the artist as medium
