The concept and title for the exhibition ‘God is Great’ evolves from two seminal
works by artist John Latham: The mysterious being known as God, 1981/2005, and
the series God is Great, 1990-2005, now part of the Tate collection.
Contemporary scepticism concerning religion and the continuous discoveries of
science have made us increasingly more curious about the fundamental essence
of creation. The recent tumultuous religious and political developments centred
in and around the Middle East give us reason now to focus on the work of three
generations of important British artists, who all concern themselves with the
‘cosmopoetic’ notions and varying interpretations of “God”.
John Latham, Anish Kapoor and Douglas Gordon, each employing distinctly
different forms of artistic expressions, explore both the origin of creation and the
universe we inhabit, as well as our ever-increasing need for community and belief
systems as we seek pathways through spiritual confusion. By positioning these
three artists within the context of this essential, yet intangible and problematic
subject, ‘God is Great’ begins to explore the way in which artistic enlightenment
may persuasively offer another method of considering what is an inherently
mysterious, emotional, often inflammatory subject.
Read moreJohn Latham began working with books as a medium in 1958, creating reliefs
emerging from plaster on canvas. In the early 1980s he replaced the white
surface of the canvas with a glass panel, propelling him a step further toward a
representation of an a-temporal and a-spatial continuum from which the
books extrude as temporal records of human history. The first ‘God is Great’
work was made in 1990. It united the three sacred texts of the great
monotheistic religions: the Torah in Hebrew, the New Testament in English
and the Qur’an in Arabic, within a single glass sculpture.
Latham suggests that “we now have a framework from which all cultures have
sprung and with reference to which any unresolved question can be discussed, if not
finally resolved”.
Anish Kapoor expresses the duality of the world and its transcendent potential
in concrete form. Renowned for his enigmatic sculptural forms, transformation is
a key element within Kapoor’s work as he challenges our perception of objects
and materials by altering their innate physical qualities and confounding our
preconceptions about matter, space and the human spirit. His sculpture, when
produced on massive scale, creates environments in which the viewer becomes
a minute participant in relation to the art, which could be interpreted as a visual
metaphor for mankind’s relationship to the universe as a whole.
Douglas Gordon manipulates the act of ‘looking’ in order to express concerns
about basic ethical and moral issues that face us all - issues that are often
incorporated into the fundamentalist canon of God and the Devil. His 1997
projection ‘Between Darkness and Light (after William Blake)’ for example, pits the
Devil against the Virgin Mary using the films The Exorcist’ and the ‘Song of
Bernadette’ as vehicles to express the coexistence of good and evil in life. His
corpus of text pieces articulate in pictorial and sculptural terms slogans that bind
people to an anxious existence while offering them a chance for deliverance.
