Pablo Bronstein: Hell in its Heyday

Created especially for Sir John Soane’s Museum, Pablo Brontein’s series of large-scale watercolours takes visitors to this exhibition on a tour of hell in a nostalgic and ironic representation of the last two centuries of progress. Imagined as a monumental city, visitors are guided through concert halls, casinos, botanical gardens, car factories and oil rigs. A new film, featuring a group of diabolical antique dealers performing a masked ballet is also shown. 

Spanning drawing, film, watercolour, choreography and performance, Pablo Bronstein’s work explores themes of consumerism, Queer identity, and, prominently, architecture. In the exhibition, the first major museum show since 2009 to focus on Bronstein’s works on paper, visitors see the accumulation of ornament, fragments and borrowed images in the Soane Museum echoed in the new works.