Introduction

Welcome to The Gallery of Shadows!

This gallery, located in a nondescript mossy cellar within the Peak District of England, greets you with a musty, curious smell the moment you walk through the creaky doors. It is manned by the lone curator, Igor D'Antoinne, who excitedly greets you. When you ask what this place is about, he responds:

"This gallery is like a beautiful sunset suffering from night terrors. Here, have some tea."

Inside there are works of art that are varied in style and medium - mostly paintings and a few sculptures and photographs - yet all off them possess a kind of yearning fear. It's the kind of fear that is adored by the artist and despised by the commoner. Let the artist's fascination with the fearful find its way deep into your belly, where your secret hesitations lie, and let those shadows wield the brush alongside the painter's hand.

Exhibition Introduction

This exhibition is called The Fine Art of Fear.

The featured artists are:

Anselm Kiefer
Balthasar Permoser
Willem de Kooning
Eugene Delacroix
Adam Fuss
Sigmar Polke
Michal Rovner
Albrecht Durer
El Greco
and Isabella Raffa

The pieces in this exhibition were chosen to explore the murkiness, beauty, and potential of fear. They all explore this often over simplified feeling under a different lens and show us another facet of the jewel. Perhaps getting to know our fears in such a way will release us from their grips. Chances are, though, it could get a little worse before it gets better. So be courageous in this gallery!

Many pieces were perused with only few selected. The ones that were selected resonated an element in the curator's belly-feeling of disturbance. Though the styles and periods have a wide scope, all humans feel fear at one time or another, and with it we can feel our unity across borders and eons.

Anselm Kiefer - The unknown masterpiece

Anselm Kiefer - The Unknown Masterpiece

1982. Watercolor, gouache, graphite, cut and pasted printed papers on paper.

25 1/16 x 28 1/2 in.

(http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/490047)

Anselm Kiefer is a German artist who has explored his country’s post-war identity, history, and mythology throughout his career. A painter, sculptor, and installation artist, materiality figures heavily into Kiefer’s practice. His large-scale paintings achieve their characteristic texture through his liberal application of pigments combined with found organic matter, metal, and lead, resulting in stark, haunting images with an imposing physicality. A Neo-Expressionist like his fellow Germans Georg Baselitz and Jörg Immendorff, Kiefer studied with the influential Conceptual artist Joseph Beuys at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he developed an interest in working with diverse materials. Though all of Kiefer’s art is unmistakably his, the artist rejects the notion that he has a signature style—“I’m not a brand,” he has said. Born on March 8, 1945 in Donaueschingen, Germany, Kiefer currently lives and works in France.

(http://www.artnet.com/artists/anselm-kiefer/)

Kiefer inscribed the title of this work in French at the bottom center-Le chef d'oeuvre inconnu-a title shared by Honoré de Balzac's story from 1831 in which an aging Baroque painter named Frenhofer works for many years to perfect a portrait that consumes him completely. Frenhofer labors in secret, painting layer upon layer, year after year, but when his followers finally view the picture, they discover that it is nothing but an unrecognizable and endlessly layered abstraction. They deem it the work of a genius gone mad. As if to link the madness of Frenhofer-whose story has also been read as an allegory of modern art-with the architectural fantasies of Nazi Germany, Kiefer bases the watercolor backdrop on a rendering of the projected Soldier's Hall for Berlin that was first sketched by Adolf Hitler in 1936. Albert Speer commissioned the architect Wilhelm Kreis to design its barrel-vaulted interior on a huge and unprecedented scale. It was never built. Meant as a monument and ceremonial hall to celebrate the victories of the German army, now its endless, imaginary columns are imbued with the horrors of the Holocaust.

To explain the layering in his own architecturally inspired works of the 1980s, the artist has stated his deep interest in the reuse and recycling of architecture: "You know, normally you don't destroy buildings ... usually you transform them, like the Christians transformed old temples or the Pantheon into Christian churches. That's what I was doing, too. … Because you never succeed in really destroying something, it always lives, and it's more efficient to transform than to destroy."

(http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/490047)

The emphasis on the dark, shadowy block gives a sense of wonderment and the slightly creepy unknown. The dark value main part of the block suddenly merges with a light-value lower strip.

The unknown is what scares us, but it is also where our potential lies. Perhaps within our fear lies our greatest masterpiece. Perhaps we need only to look into this unknown piece to discover what we're been searching for all along.

El Greco - The Vision of St. John

El Greco - The Vision of Saint John

Oil on canvas. ca 1609-14. 87 1/2 x 76in. (222.3 x 193cm); with added strips 88 1/2 x 78 1/2 in. (224.8 x 199.4 cm) [top truncated]
http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436576?rpp=30&pg=1&ft=el+greco+(domenikos+theotokopoulos)&pos=3

El Greco was a Greek artist whose painting and sculpture helped define the Spanish Renaissance and influence various movements to come. (http://www.biography.com/people/el-greco-9319123)

"The painting is a fragment from a large altarpiece commissioned for the church of the hospital of Saint John the Baptist in Toledo. It depicts a passage in the Bible, Revelation (6:9-11) describing the opening of the Fifth Seal at the end of time, and the distribution of white robes to "those who had been slain for the work of God and for the witness they had borne." The missing upper part may have shown the Sacrificial Lamb opening the Fifth Seal. The canvas was an iconic work for twentieth-century artists and Picasso, who knew it in Paris, used it as an inspiration for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon." [http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436576?rpp=30&pg=1&ft=el+greco+(domenikos+theotokopoulos)&pos=3]

This piece wields a striking use of form to represent people in great want of salvation. It also utilizes movement in a way that makes it seem like the sky is cracking open and the winds are howling.
This piece is featured because it highlights the primordial fear: the fear of disappearance. The end of time is upon the people inside the scene, and you can see the fear and want of salvation in their faces and bodily expressions.

Albrecht Dürer - Melencholia I

Albrecht Dürer - Melencholia I

Engraving. 1514. 

Plate: 9 7/16 × 7 5/16 in. (24 × 18.5 cm)

(http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/336228)

Albrecht Dürer, (born May 21, 1471, Imperial Free City of Nürnberg [Germany]—died April 6, 1528, Nürnberg), painter and printmaker generally regarded as the greatest German Renaissance artist. His vast body of work includes altarpieces and religious works, numerous portraits and self-portraits, and copper engravings. His woodcuts, such as the Apocalypse series (1498), retain a more Gothic flavour than the rest of his work.

(https://www.britannica.com/biography/Albrecht-Durer-German-artist)

Dürer's Melencolia I is one of three large prints of 1513 and 1514 known as his Meisterstiche (master engravings). The other two are Knight, Death, and the Devil (43.106.2) and Saint Jerome in His Study (19.73.68). The three are in no way a series, but they do correspond to the three kinds of virtue in medieval scholasticism--moral, theological, and intellectual--and they embody the complexity of Dürer's thought and that of his age.

Melencolia I is a depiction of the intellectual situation of the artist and is thus, by extension, a spiritual self-portrait of Dürer. In medieval philosophy each individual was thought to be dominated by one of the four humors; melancholy, associated with glack gall, was the least desirable of the four, and melancholics were considered the most likely to succumb to insanity. Renaissance thought, however, also linked melancholy with creative genius; thus, at the same time that this idea changed the status of this humor, it made the self-conscious artist aware that his gift came with terrible risks.

The winged personification of Melancholy, seated dejectedly with her head reasting on her hand, holds a caliper and is surrounded by other tools associated with geometry, the one of the seven liberal arts that underlies artistic creation--and the one through which Dürer, probably more than most artists, hoped to approach perfection in his own work. An influential treatise, the De Occulta Philosophia of Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, almost certainly known to Dürer, probably holds the explanation for the number I in the title: creativity in the arts was the realm of the imagination, considered the first and lowest in the hierarchy of the three categories of genius. The next was the realm of reason, and the highest the realm of spirit. It is ironic that this image of the artist paralyzed and powerless exemplifies Dürer's own artistic power at its superlative height.

(http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/336228)

This pieces uses patterns of down-trotted expressions to create a motif of sadness. The texture of the sky introduces an almost whimsical depth to the engraving that brings the emotional quality beyond mere sadness. 

This piece is featured to highlight the main symptom of a fearful life - sadness. Here we have angels and demon-like beasts both looking down - fear has relaxed its frequency slightly, but only into agitation and melancholy. 

Balthasar - Marsyas

Balthasar Permoser - Marsyas

ca. 1680–85. Marble on a black marble socle inlaid with light marble panels.

Overall with socle (confirmed): H. 27 x W. 17 3/8 x D. 11 1/8 in.

(http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/211486)

The Late Baroque German sculptor Balthasar Permoser was the foremost exponent of German Baroque art in Dresden. He studied sculpture in Salzburg during his teens prior to a 14-year stint in Italy (1675-89). While in Florence he carved the exterior of S. Gaetano (c.1684) and worked on commissions for Grand Duke Cosimo III. In 1689, he left Italy to take up the position of Court Sculptor in Dresden, where he spent the rest of his life, except for a few trips to Berlin, and two visits. Although strongly influenced by the Baroque art of Bernini (1598-1680), Permoser nevertheless - like Andreas Schluter (1664-1714) and other fellow northerners - infused his later work with elements of classicism. In addition, his lavish decoration of the Zwinger Palace in Dresden is an excellent exemplar of full-blown Rococo art. Aside from the Zwinger, Permoser's best known works of Baroque sculpture are Apollo (1715, Staatliche Kunstsammulungen, Dresden) and Apotheosis of Prince Eugene (1718-21, Belvedere Gallery, Vienna).

(http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/sculpture/balthasar-permoser.htm)

Flayed alive after losing a musical contest to the god Apollo, the satyr Marsyas screams in the midst of his torture. Every aspect of the figure, from squinting eyes to torn tongue and flamelike hair, contributes to this image of torment. Early in his career, the sculptor Permoser worked in Florence, where this bust likely was carved. It is his personal response to Gianlorenzo Bernini's dramatic style, especially the Damned Soul of about 1619 (Palazzo di Spagna, Rome). While important sculptures by Pietro and Gianlorenzo Bernini are represented in the Museum's collection, Marsyas is our first work by Permoser, who helped to transmit the Italian Baroque style to Germany when he returned to his native Dresden.

(http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/211486)

This sculpture utilizes line and shape to display the great pain on the face of Marsyas. The emphasis on the facial expression makes it ever more captivating.

We're all afraid of feeling like poor, tortured Marsyas does in this sculpture. We can almost feel a shade of his pain when we look at such a grimace.  

Willem de Kooning - Attic

Willem de Kooning - Attic

1949. Oil, enamel, and newspaper transfer on canvas.

61 7/8 x 81 in.

(http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/482491)

Born in Rotterdam, Holland, Willem de Kooning left school at sixteen and apprenticed with a firm of commercial artists and decorators. In 1926, he moved to New York, where his first job was as a house painter. Sharing a studio with the artist Arshile Gorky, de Kooning immersed himself in the New York art scene. He quickly developed a highly individual style that is characterized by his "allover" approach to the composition and his thick, energetic application of paint. In his refusal to completely abandon representation—as witnessed by his extended series of Women and, later, Clam Diggers—de Kooning always veered from the mainstream of Abstract Expressionism, although he was a leader of that movement along with Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.

(http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/482491)

Between 1946 and 1949, de Kooning produced a series of highly abstract black-and-white-paintings that culminated in "Attic," in which angular, thrusting forms collide with organic, curvilinear ones to yield a high-pitched, expressive picture. The dense web of white shapes and black lines makes it difficult to sort out relationships between form and space, though it is still possible to determine a figural basis for the scene. Stretched across the canvas are biomorphic symbols and shapes that allude to the curves and forms of human anatomy.

De Kooning's palette of black and white, with touches of red and yellow, was determined in part by the availability of inexpensive commercial enamel paint. Although restricted in his use of color, de Kooning displays virtuosity in his sensuous, expressive handling of paint, surface, and line. His gestural brushwork and dynamic allover composition exemplify the new visual language adopted by the Abstract Expressionist painters. De Kooning routinely made revisions on his canvases, and "Attic" was exhibited at two different stages of completion. To accelerate the drying time of the paint, he blotted sheets of newspaper over the wet canvas, and the surface bears evidence of transferred newsprint. Immediately following "Attic," de Kooning reintroduced full color into his work, already hinted at here in the touches of red and yellow, and he soon returned to the figurative imagery for which he is best known.

(http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/482491)

This piece implies a rough visually yet smooth to the touch texture. It uses the principal of harmony in reverse: a sense of disjointedness is displayed. One could say there is harmony it its disharmony.

The Attic is where our darkest secrets lie, where we're afraid to go at night, and where we dare never to turn on the light. If fear had a favorite room, it would be this one. 

Delacroix - Abduction of Rebecca

Eugène Delacroix - The Abduction of Rebecca

1846. Oil on canvas. 

39 1/2 x 32 1/4 in.

(http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/438814)

Eugène Delacroix was born in Charenton-Saint-Maurice, France, on April 26, 1798. He received his artistic training in Paris and became known as a leading figure of the French Romantic era of the 19th century. Inspired by history, literature and exotic locales, Delacroix painted such famous works as "Liberty Leading the People" and "The Death of Sardanapalus." He died in Paris on August 13, 1863.

(http://www.biography.com/people/eugne-delacroix-40979)

Throughout his career, Delacroix was inspired by the novels of Sir Walter Scott, a favorite author of the French Romantics. This painting depicts a scene from Ivanhoe: the Jewish heroine Rebecca, who had been confined in the castle of Front de Boeuf (seen in flames), is carried off by two Saracen slaves commanded by the covetous Christian knight Bois-Guilbert. The contorted, interlocking poses and compacted space, which shifts abruptly from the elevated foregound to the fortress behind, create a sense of intense drama. Apart from the still life at lower left, the only element of calm is Rebecca herself.

(http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/438814)

This piece uses a dark value to create a musty, dramatic mood. It uses movement in the form of the action-packed scene to create a further sense of excitement.

The Abduction of Rebecca is featured here to highlight the occurrence of event-specific fear. Most would be terrified of an abduction, but curiously, Rebecca looks rather unperturbed. Still, our fears fill in her for lack of them in this intense scene.

Adam Fuss - Love

Adam Fuss - Love

Gelatin silver print photograph. 1992.

Frame: 43 1/2 × 33 1/2 in.

(http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/266855)

Adam Fuss, born in 1961, has refined a cameraless technique in his work, relying on the most basic infrastructure of photography: objects, light and light-sensitive material. His work includes photograms of water droplets, smoke, flowers, christening gowns, and birds captured in flight. He is also known for reviving the laborious daguerreotype technique, with breathtaking results.

His work is illustrated in several monographs, among them Adam Fuss and My Ghost. The Fundación Mapfre, Madrid, mounted a comprehensive survey of Fuss’s work in January 2011. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among many others.

(https://fraenkelgallery.com/artists/adam-fuss)

With his large-scale color photograms of water, babies, or, in this case, rabbits, Adam Fuss has breathed new life into the cameraless technique that became the hallmark of such modernist photographers as Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy in the 1920s. Fuss made this image by placing two slaughtered and eviscerated rabbits on a photosensitized sheet of paper and exposing it to light. The spectacular color effects result from the chemical interactions between the rabbits' viscera and the properties of the printing paper. Combining the expansive gestures of Action Painting with the composed symmetry of a heraldic seal, Fuss turns this traditional symbol of fertility into an emblem of the rapturous, often gut-wrenching intertwining of two selves united in love.

(http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/281940)

This piece uses rhythm to create the sense of the blood flowing between the rabbits. They may be dead, but there is still a life-force connection in motion. The texture of the guts give a disturbing yet curiously heart-melding effect.

Adam Fuss here has shown us that even Love can be terrifying! These two creatures teach us a whole new meaning to "Loving each other to death". Or perhaps the reality of what love is not all polka dots and moonbeams as is commonly thought.

Sigmar Polke- untitled

Sigmar Polke - Untitled

Gelatin silver print. 1975.

104.5 x 135.5cm (41 1/8 x 53 3/8in.)

(http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/266855)

Sigmar Polke was a German painter whose work is characterized by the artist’s unique brand of cleverness, irony, and humor. Though it largely started as response to the influx of American media into post-war Germany, Polke’s work was initially influenced by the Capitalist Realism movement he founded with Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg while they studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1963. Together, these artists mounted a response to the nationalistic themes of Socialist Realism developing in what was then East Germany, with Polke’s practice serving as a particularly sharp critique of his country’s burgeoning consumer society. For his “dot paintings,” or Rasterbilder, Polke enlarged printed images to enhance the Benday dots—made popular by Roy Lichtenstein—to comment on the artifice in American Pop Art and culture. Born on February 13, 1941 in Oels, Germany, Polke’s paintings, prints, sculptures, and artist books reflected his tendency to use untraditional materials such as soot, detergent, and synthetic fabrics throughout his career. He died on June 10, 2010 in Cologne, Germany at the age of 69.

(http://www.artnet.com/artists/sigmar-polke/)

One of the most provocative artists of postwar Europe, Sigmar Polke has created works critical of Western culture since 1963, when he and fellow artist Gerhard Richter began using photography as the basis for paintings that satirized the look and message of consumer culture. Since that time Polke has continued to use photography as the breeding ground for innovation.

During the 1970s Polke painted little but traveled widely with his camera—to Paris, New York, Brazil, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. His subjects were night life, low life, the underworld, and the Third World—arenas in which life is lived in defiance or ignorance of established Western social rules. The basis of this image is one of a series of negatives exposed in a bar in São Paolo, Brazil, showing a group of men drinking.

Polke considers the darkroom a sort of alchemic laboratory in which he can explore infinite mutations of imagery. With the negative in his enlarger, the artist developed this large sheet selectively, pouring on photographic solutions and repeatedly creasing and folding wet paper. The resulting abstract organic forms thus issue from and reexpress the boozy, convivial energy of the scene.

(http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/266855)

Polke uses contrast between the dark and the light figures to create a jarring and striking juxtaposition between the shapes. The use of shape in an unfamiliar way gives the piece an unsettling feeling.

This piece exemplifies the visuals experienced when one confronts the depths of fear. It could be seen as an abstract representation of fear itself. The disturbing qualities of the shapes and darkness translate a sense of contemplative terror into the viewer. 

Michal Rovner - Border #8

Michal Rovner - Border #8

1997-8. Paint on canvas. 

128.9 x 169.5 cm (50 3/4 x 66 3/4 in.)

(http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/282883)

Michal Rovner's layered and intentionally ambiguous work touches on the processes of historical documentation, archaeology, science, and choreography to activate states of probing. Her installations are constructed out of materials ranging from symbolic stones to a video-photography-printmaking hybrid of her own invention. Rovner places actors in her short film pieces, however, they are shrouded in black and often difficult to differentiate against the backdrop of the desert, making them emblematic and anonymous figures, as in her 2003 short film More. At the other end of the spectrum are her works Makom I and II (2007-2008), four-walled installations built out of cubic stones that were once part of Israeli and Palestinian homes in which Rovner used ancient stone masonry techniques to construct the structures.

(https://www.artsy.net/artist/michal-rovner)

Over the past decade Rovner, an Israeli-born artist now based in New York City, has produced an evocative body of work concerning the intersection of reality, feeling, and memory. This powerful image derives from the prologue of Rovner's video "Border" (1997), in which she explores the psychological and political meanings of geographical and national borders, using the military access road from Israel to Lebanon as a site and herself as a model. Working with a still from the video, which she deftly and variously enhanced in color, scale, and texture, Rovner generated fifteen different computerized image files. An outdoor sign company then digitally airbrushed these images onto canvas, creating fifteen unique large-scale variations on this brooding landscape, each in a slightly different mood.

In order to express the intensity of her personal experience adequately but in terms general enough to apply to the broader human condition, Rovner often marries photography, video, digital art, and painting in a mélange that ignores traditional categories of medium and process. This technological fluency helps her generate pictures of unusual authority and resonance: fusions of the real and the imaginary as familiar as scenes in our own dreams and just as spare, haunting, and, ultimately, elusive.

(http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/282883)

This piece utilizes perspective and scale to create a sense of great loneliness in the subject. It makes great use of space to further emphasize the solitude.

This piece is included for its representation of the fear of being alone. It represents the long, lonely, and fearful road that we must often travel in this life. 

Isabella Raffa - Fear of Time

Isabella Raffa - Fear of Time

Watercolor on paper. 12x22". 2014.

http://imgur.com/PM0Eead

Raffa's comments on this piece:

"At the time I was drawing this, time was my biggest fear."

"That was made in a very 'heavy' period of my life.."

"I guess there isn't just one story to be told, at this point :)"

from https://www.reddit.com/r/Art/comments/52qh4c/fear_of_time_isabella_raffa_watercolor_on_paper/

Isabella Raffa is an Italian artist whose focus includes portraits, drawings, paintings, furniture styling, collages, and body art. 

Sources: https://www.facebook.com/pg/EazyCreations/about/?ref=page_internal

http://isabellaraffa.deviantart.com/

This piece combines bright colors with shades of darker values to create a compelling contrast of darkness and light, fear and beauty. It seems to contain nearly every shade between the yellow and the black. This piece was chosen to be part of this gallery because it exemplifies the beautiful side of fear and how even the disturbing can be alluring.

Conclusion

While organizing this exhibition, I learned about how having a theme in mind and searching for pieces that fit that theme actually frees you to see elements in the art that were unnoticed before. I began looking for this element of fear in unlikely places. This helped me to realize the depth, scope, and ubiquity of such a feeling. I realized that it pervades much of artistic expression. It felt quite natural to know when a piece resonated with the theme - I knew it right away. On the other hand, it was a challenge to describe the elements and principals of design because I tend to absorb a piece as a whole, and sometimes have a hard time distilling the elements used. However, I feel I improved at this skill as a result of this project.

I have a newfound respect for art curators, because it requires a kind of surety to know that other people will feel the same about a piece as you do. One also must possess a kind of charisma to convince those who are skeptical that these are the right pieces to share. Above all it takes an emotional sensitivity that can utilize sense perception in a way that finds commonality across various sensorial inputs.

It was a pleasure to work on such a project and to deepen my understanding of art through this course. Many thanks to Professor McCambly for this opportunity!