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“Michael Petry celebrates the ceremonial, memorialises the mythical and acknowledges, honours and explores the deeper spirits within us whom we all feel and hear yet have always found hard to name. Our gods and our devils.”
Stephen Fry
The main body of Michael Petry’s exhibition, ‘In League with Devils’, consists of bronze sculptures from the last decade supplemented by more recent works including a new series of Heaven paintings. All the works deal with historic and current belief systems.
The main piece, the large-scale installation, At the Foot of the Gods, was originally commissioned for the 1st Biënnale Oosterhout (2017, Netherlands). The work is made up of almost one hundred bronze casts of human toes that appear, at first, to have been broken off Classical Greek sculptures. Other works include the large bronze, Apollo’s Mirror, that has been patinated on one side to appear ancient, while the reverse is polished so that viewers can clearly see themselves. Petry’s Gifts of Apollo are solid bronze which are first silver plated then 24k gold plated.
Petry has made several new bronzes for the exhibition at Vane, including Ha-Nahash (The Serpent), the Hebrew name for the serpent said to have tempted Adam and Eve, which is never called Satan in the Torah or original Old Testament versions. Equally as arresting is Libation to Baal, a bronze lingam, a totem to the god whose cult required the sacrifice of human babies. The Heaven paintings are part of his series, Landscape and Gods, and are based on the religious ideas of what heaven looks like for the many differing faiths.
Artist:
Michael Petry was born in Texas, USA, in 1960. He is an artist, author and Director of MOCA London. He co-founded the Museum of Installation, London, and is a previous Curator of the Royal Academy Schools Gallery. Petry’s Thames & Hudson books include Installation Art, Installation Art in the New Millennium: The Empire of the Senses, The Art of Not Making: The New Artist / Artisan Relationship, Nature Morte: Contemporary artists reinvigorate the Still-Life tradition, and The Word is Art. His new book, MirrorMirror: The Reflective Surface in Contemporary Art, will be published in November 2024. Many of the books are associated with touring exhibitions he has curated, such as is ‘Hidden Histories: 20th century male same sex lovers in the visual arts’ for the New Art Gallery Walsall (2004). Petry was the first Artist in Residence at Sir John Soane’s Museum and recent one man shows include ‘The Touch of the Oracle’, Palm Springs Art Museum, USA (2012), and ‘In League with Devils’, Henry Luce III Center for the Arts, Washington DC, USA (2023). Petry’s work has been shown in museums and international exhibitions including Frontiers Reimagined at the 2015 Venice Biennale.
Vane, Orbis Community, 65 High Street, Gateshead, NE8 2AP UK
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