ROBERT POWELL A Universal History of Iniquity
The Naming of the Beasts The Auctor Transuting Ideas into Binary The Ikaros School The Marvellous and Quite Braw Apotheosis of Robert Burns The Clay Mirror The Secret Garden The Chaste Leap And Yet it Moves The Stone Web Bonjour Monsieur Mandeville Super Mega Duper The Architect of Ruins Cenotaphia The Influence Machine The Place of Forgetting The Ineffable Assumption
All works in this catalogue are hand-tinted etchings, 30cm x 30cm.
As Adam and Eve at the zoo enunciate the first nouns, they are spied on by Adam’s first wife Lilith. In the distance an inebriated Noah is cursing his son. This piece is inspired by book illustrations, reliefs and screen prints of mid-twentieth century artists such as John Piper, Edward Bawden, Edward Ardizzone and Jean de Brunhoff, infiltrated by creatures from medieval bestiaries and gargoyles from gothic cathedrals.
The Naming of the Beasts or Before the Flood
Here Saint Jerome is re-imagined as a clerical worker with Standard Life or RBS. The work contains elements from legends about the invention of writing by the Egyptian Thoth, later identified with the Greek Hermes and the Roman Mercury, or the Norse god Odin. It also references the word magic of Lullists and Cabbalists, the discussions of artificial languages by John Wilkins and Sir Thomas Urquhart, the legendary derivation of Gaelic by the prince Gaythelos from the best of the languages before Babel and Hugh Macdiarmid’s Lallans. The composition and subject is inspired by the picture by Antonello de Messina in the National Gallery in London and by Turner’s picture of Rosslyn Chapel.
The Auctor Transmuting Ideas into Binary or Saint Jerome in his Cubicle
The Ikaros School teaches both flight and folly. The mythical Greek figure of Daedalus finds his equivalent in Germanic and Norse mythology in the smith Weyland, and as the Curious Artificer of Joyce and Ovid is credited with all the ingenious mechanics and inventions of the Classical World, so his northern counterpart finds his name associated with the finest weaponry and armour. Like Daedalus forced to labour for a great king, Weyland escaped his captivity – again like Daedalus – by fashioning a pair of wings, in his case from the corpses of his captor’s children. Weyland and Daedalus are symbols of the birth of industry and the North Sea oil rig in the background fuels their activities. Another source of inspiration for this piece, rather more comic and earthy, is William Dunbar’s poem The Fenyeit Freir of Tungland.
The Ikaros School or The Invention of Flight
This is part of a Scottish re-imagining of the Divine Comedy with Robert Burns as the Caledonian Dante and his pet sheep Maillie - for whom he wrote two not-so-serious elegies - as his Beatrice. In a smaller companion piece, Robert Fergusson shows Burns the Scottish hell, “an Auld and Reekie Place”. The composition is taken from Brueghel’s ‘Suicide of Saul’, but the landscape and figures derive from 19th century Scottish paintings in the National Gallery of Scotland. Burns himself is taken from Nasmyth, while other influences include Landseer and other High Victorian Romantics. The Ossian scene at the top right is from Runciman with a touch of Ingres. An obvious source for the whole idea of ‘a Scottish re-imagining’ is the work of Calum Colvin.
The Marvellous and Quite Braw Apotheosis of Robert Burns Chaperoned by his Ovine Beatrice, Poor Maillie, the Tragically Strangled Yewe
In this version of the story of the architect Dinocrates, who offered to carve Mount Athos into an image of Alexander the Great, Arthur’s Seat stands in for Mount Athos. In the background a bus ferries tourists through the suburbs of Edinburgh, which, girdling the Holy Mountain, embody other ways in which man has carved nature into his own image. The composition is taken from the architectural consultation depicted in Brueghel’s Tower of Babel.
The Clay Mirror or Dinocrates and Alexander
As with The Chaste Leap, the germ of this piece lay in ideas about paintings which, while ostensibly passing a moral judgement on voyeuristic lewdness, are at the same time indulging it. It was informed by 17th and 18th century country house or estate pictures - like that of Yester House in the National Gallery of Scotland - which are part landscapes and part maps, providing a thrilling mixture of perspectives. Artists like Iain Hamilton Finlay and Peter Greenaway have commented on the ideological links between Baroque gardens and tyranny in their work, and these ideas are here too.
The Secret Garden or Hygienic Suzanna Peeked Upon by her Elders
There is a strong hypocritical element to historical images of Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife, images made for men to ogle female flesh which also decry the culpable licentiousness of women, allowing the oglers to feel smug as they ogle. This piece combines several classic ogle-settings: the orientalist fantasy of the odalisque in Western art, the Paris Opera, Weimar-era Berlin cabaret. There’s a lot to ogle. The composition comes from Rembrandt’s Presentation of Jesus in the Temple in the Hague.
The Chaste Leap or Joseph Resisting the Wiles of Phryne, Potiphar’s Charming Wife
The genesis of this picture of the invention of astrology lay in thoughts about the ancient origins of this pseudo-science, the dominant role it played throughout history and its continued influence – albeit in a debased form – today. Much of the imagery derives from star charts of the 16th and 17th centuries, while the title is taken from Galileo’s alleged sotto voce comment after being forced to recant by the Inquisition.
And Yet it Moves
Antonio Bosio is credited with the 17th century exploration of the Roman catacombs whilst Vivant Denon was Napoleon’s Egyptologist, a writer and the creator of strange drawings, combinations of archaeology, fantasy and pornography. This picture is of the invention of practical archaeology when antiquarians stopped worrying about getting dirty and started to investigate the past by digging rather than reading, developing along the way a concept of time as something vertical, where the past is considered ‘deep’. A number of archaeological pictures and pictures of Roman ruins, such as those of Piranesi and David Roberts, were used in creating this work.
The Stone Web or The Subterranean Spelunking and Careful Chthonic Exhumation of Vivant Denon and Antonio Bosio
Addressing ideas about exploration, travel, exoticism and colonialism, and engaging with Said’s critique of orientalism, much of this picture was done during a residency in Japan. It is a visual Mirabilia, or list or wonders, and is influenced by portrayals in medieval mappa mundi of such fabulous creatures as the skiapods, the blemmyes, and the cyclopes. Fernao Mendez Pinto, the first European to describe a journey to Japan, was nick-named “Liar” in his native Portugal, while Sir John Mandeville became the most popular travel-writer of the middle ages despite being almost certainly a fictional creation. The work also references other travellers whose tales were dismissed, such as the immense Scotsman James Bruce of Kinnaird.
Bonjour Monsieur Mandeville or the Mirabilous Meeting of Liar Pinto and Honest Sir John
The judgement of Solomon takes place in a Cockaigne conceived as a Willie Low’s supermarket. The films of Pipollotti Rist were an influence, where a supermarket is cast as a garden of Eden. Here though the supermarket shelves are stacked with the contents of Eduardo Paolozzi’s cabinets at the Dean Gallery and figures taken from the lithographs of Ernst Haeckel.
Super Mega Duper or Huge Maxi Savings at Abundia Cockaigne Ltd as Wise King Solomon Wisely Slashes Infants to Give You Unprecedented Extra £££’s and Two Babies for the Price of Just One or the Amazing Dichotomy of Value in the Land Where He Who Sleeps Most Earns Most
This is inspired by the works of war-artists and neo-romantics like Graham Sutherland, John Piper, Henry Moore and Mervyn Peake, who constructed fresh and poignant images of ruins, as well as paintings by David Roberts, and David Young Cameron’s Baths of Caracalla. In its colours and composition it refers to the work of the two Roberts. John Soane demanded of the architect and painter Joseph Michael Gandy that he paint his prospective buildings as prospective ruins, while Albert Speer and Adolf Hitler preferred not to use any modern materials in the buildings of the Third Reich, imagining that their crumbling remains would thereby be more picturesque and more akin to the monuments of Rome that inspired artists like Piranesi. Speer called the practice of erecting a building with its ruin in mind ruinwert.
The Archtect of Ruins or John Soane Envisions, but Albert Speer Creates the Ruinwert
The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus is recast as a theme park of grief. Many of the graves and funerary monuments depicted are to be found in Greyfriars Kirkyard and in the photographs of Hill & Adamson. Much of the inspiration for this piece came from thinking about communal grief, particularly as expressed in war memorials, and about how the cemeteries and battle-fields of Flanders and Northern France have become a tourist destination.
Ceontaphia or The Bone Shakin’, Finger Snappin’, Skull-Claspin’, Halicarnassian Fun Park of Mausolus: Putting the Excitement Back into Melancholy, the Laughs Back into Lamentation, the Mirth into Mourning
Created to mark the opening of the new Apple Store on Princes Street, this picture features the delusions of James Tilley Mathews, the first person recorded as combining (proto) computers and paranoia. Victor Tausk’s The Influence Machine investigates a number of historical figures who believed their brains were under the control of devious machines, and, 150 years before Alan Turing, Mathews believed that an infernal version of the Jacquard Loom was controlling his actions. Early twentieth century outsider artists like Adolf Woffli, and Prinzhorn collected artists like Johann Knopf, were visual influences.
The Influence Machine
or Illustrations of the Air Loom: Exhibiting a Singular Case of Bomb-Bursting, Lobster-Cracking and Lengthening the Brain, Embellished with Apoplexy Working with the Nutmeg Grager and Stomach Skinning: Featuring the Perpetrations of Billy the King, the Glove Women, Sir Archy and the Infamous Middleman
In this picture the National Gallery of Scotland plays the role of The Palace of Forgetting, and its depiction draws on both the anonymous Scottish School picture of the gallery interior in the National Gallery of Scotland’s collection and on Louvre pictures, as well as on 17th and 18th century works by artists such as Zoffany showing great collectors proudly alongside their collections. The title refers to the response of the Athenian general Themistocles to the memory system of Simonides, which suggested visualising that which was to be remembered in different rooms of an imaginary mental palace. Instead of a system of memory, Themistocles retorted, he would rather have a method of forgetting all the dreadful things that he had seen. It may well be that early galleries and museums were seen by renaissance intellectuals as forms of such a memory palace. This particular memory palace is filled with images of atrocity and human suffering, things that we would rather forget or aestheticize. Pictures by Otto Dix, Jacques Calotte, Graham Sutherland, George Grosz and, in particular, Goya have been cannibalised for this picture.
The Place of Forgetting or The Lament of Simonides and Themistocles
The Saved celebrate whilst the Damned are ensnared by little black demons. This picture shows the end of times – or, perhaps, time eternal. As such, The Ineffable Assumption serves as a conclusion to the series, but since this is a cyclical cycle, it is too, its beginning and its steady, static centre. The bottom section derives from the icon of The Heavenly Ladder of Saint John Klimakos, whilst the upper register is an amalgamation of Baroque ceilings.
The Ineffable Assumption
Robert Powell was born in Edinburgh in 1985 He attended Edinburgh College of Art, graduating in 2008 He lives and works in Edinburgh. Statement: “I was born in 1985 and haven’t stopped breathing since. From a very early age I experimented with peculiar forms of visual expression, mostly – after the baby porridge era – in the media of wax crayon and felt-tips. In my art existed a tension between a reverence of the natural world and the urge to defy it with my own creations. The culmination was a giant Encyclopedia that would bring into existence for the reader an entirely new world with cultures, religions, philosophies, art and every other achievement of people and nature. It did not succeed. The torment tore me apart and now I only do pastel studies of my potted plants.”
Solo Exhibitions 2011 Histories of the Perplexed, Stag Studios, Edinburgh 2010 Lecturing Upon a Shadow: The Art of Robert Powell, Henderson Gallery, Edinburgh Mixed Ehibitions 2015 Kilmorack Gallery, Beauly 2013 Art of Humour, Kilmorack Gallery, Beauly 2008 Strathearn Gallery, Crieff Awards 2008 John Watson Bequest Award 2007 Andrew Grant Award 2006 RMJM Architecture Award
the stone web - oil on board
www.kilmorakgallery.co.uk