After the flamboyant, dazzling and sunny exhibition of last Summer given to us in Avignon by Cy Twombly with the jubilatory title "Blooming, A Scattering of Blossom and other things," the summer of 2008 shall be devoted to the Scottish artist Douglas Gordon who, as a counterpoint to this blissfulness worthy of Matisse, will propose a lunar, sombre exhibition of a quite saturnine melancholy.
The exhibition will be on view through November 2, 2008.
In the halls and stairways will glide the ghosts of Dr Charcot and his female guinea-pigs used for his study on hysteria, the prowlers of the extraordinary stories of Edgar Allan Poe, the freshly guillotined head of a man condemned to death who dialogues for a few more seconds with the medical examiner, Mary Shelley's hybrid invention of Frankenstein or the still emblematic Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, beautiful and tragic like Goethe's Faust, Douglas Gordon's ultimate distorting mirror.
Douglas Gordon: UNNATURALHISTORIE at the Grande Chapelle du Palais des Papes
Much inspired by the monumental architecture as by the medieval history of the site, Douglas Gordon has conceived his new creation as a video made up of two immense screens on which images are projected that have been mostly shot in the great audience chamber and the grand chapel.
A fine connoisseur of representations of the duality of good and evil, the artist has chosen the favourite animals of a bestiary that brings us back to the history of the Palais just as to Christian symbolism and classical iconography or coming from the founding texts of the Old Testament...or even to the iconography of Provencal tales. -- www.gagosian.com
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