Antiquity

A new exhibition of the latest body of work by London-based Chilean artist, Pato Bosich, will open on 15 November, 2018 at the McCaslin Project Space in London.

Inspired by the British Museum’s collections of, Assyrian, Mesoamerican, Greek, Mesopotamian and other antiquities and developed over a period of more than five years, both on-site and in his studio, this imaginative series of works on paper using pencil, ink, and wine are the artist’s response to the materiality and iconography of the antiquities, and his fascination for their fragmentation over the course of history. This exhibition coincides with the British Museum’s latest exhibition, ‘I am Ashurbanipal: king of the world, king of Assyria’, that runs until 24 February 2018.

Bosich’s use of the unconventional combination of ink and wine has uncanny parallels with a poem by the 13th century mystic Abraham Abulafia, often cited by the artist, about perceiving our soul as blood and our spirit as ink, and that understanding the battle that rages between them is our key to self-knowledge.

In many ancient cultures, the supernatural and the fantastic are accessed through the qualities of the animal, and a recurrent theme in this exhibition is the metamorphoses of both animal and human, in particular the female form. Ancient art has an evocative presence that is never merely visual and as a result the artist’s multi -sensory response to the antiquities give a tactile quality to his drawings. Symbols are embodied to play and multiply with each other and new forms are reconfigured as the artist navigates these ancient époques and arrives at the present. His drawings thus represent a form of artistic ‘time-travel’, a fusion of past, present, and future into a cohesive whole.

The exhibition opens an extraordinary dialogue between this contemporary artist’s Latin American cultural sensibility and the British Museum’s antiquities collection viewed through a Eurocentric prism.