After Life: ‘BEYOND’ at me Collectors Room

Mar. 27, 2019

What lies beyond life as we know it, beyond the world as we have come to understand it? The answers to these questions may never be clear, but next month, me Collectors Room will open a new exhibition, titled ‘Beyond,’ that explores the subject of the afterlife through the lens of seven international artists: Jonas Burgert, Jake & Dinos Chapman, George Condo, Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, FORT, Kris Martin and Fracisco de Goya.

Goya’s series ‘Disasters of War’ (1810–20), for example, is an 82-piece memento mori born of cruel experiences. The Chapmans take Goya’s pieces as a starting point for their contemporary landscapes filled with dismembered body parts, mutants, and…Nazis. Although these are cruel experiences indeed, the exhibition will also look toward the mythical through Burgert’s theatrical paintings in which figures move across a membrane of cultural symbols and the collective FORT, whose installation conflates reality with fiction.

Meanwhile, videos by Djurberg & Berg thematize social ills as a kind of nightmare and Condo’s distorted portraits convey inner states of distress. Martin, on a lighter note, addresses collective cultural memory through a monumental sculpture. Through the variety of media presented (painting, installation, video, printmaking and sculpture), the exhibition promises to simultaneously reveal future possibilities as well as pose questions about the illusive ‘afterlife’ and what the word might actually mean.