Gothic Modern: From Darkness to Light

Vincent van Gogh, Head of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette, 1886, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

Gothic Modern focuses on 19th and 20th artists influenced by European medieval and Northern Renaissance depictions of birth, death, suffering and sexuality. These ‘modern’ artists were interested in the dark side of the human psyche, strangeness, and depicting uncanny frightening things, and some moved away from their canvases and started creating glass art, furniture and tapestries. In addition to paintings and prints, the exhibition displays objects, sculptures and furniture, including a rarely seen sheet music cabinet from the late 1890s, carved by Mary and Akseli Gallen-Kallela together. Artists also became interested in the restoration of churches, and the art of the period was characterised by non-commercialism and introversion.  The Ateneum launched a significant international cooperation project on the topic in 2018, and the exhibition is the fruit of this research

The exhibition includes paintings such as Hugo Simberg’s The Garden of Death and Edvard Munch’s The Sun as well as works by Helene Schjerfbeck, Fritz Boehle and Marianne Stokes.  Other key works are the prints by the German artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945). These emotional and political works deal, for example, with the trauma of war, the loss of a child, and grief. Kollwitz is a big name globally in art at the moment, and a solo exhibition of her work is on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York until 30 July 2024. Kollwitz’s art, with its timeless formal idiom and its themes, resonates in our own time, in which there is a need to process grief and trauma through art.