Mystic
July 11, 2018
Mohamad Said Baalbaki, Joseph Beuys, John Brown, Winston Chmielinsky, Amrita Dhillon, Boris Eldagsen, Amir Fattal, Peter Freitag, GODsDOGs, Almagul Menlibayeva, Hermann Nitsch, Raymond Pettibon, Matthias Reinmuth,
Römer + Römer, Nora Roggausch, Antonio Santin, Drew Simpson, Emilie Trice, Deborah Wargon, Peter Wilde, Christopher Winter
KARL OSKAR GALLERY is proud to present Mystic, a group exhibition curated by Peter Wilde, exploring mysticism in contemporary art. Mystic presents works by twenty three artists who explore the outskirts of transcendental, surreal and magical experience.
The show brings together a variety of figurative and abstract representations of mystical experience, all of which are an attempt to transcend the mundane. Some harken back to an ancient language of symbols and archetypes - to an underground root system that is the bulwark of religion and spirituality. Several of the artists play with pop culture, using its flatness and superficiality to address issues of meaning, eternity and mortality. Others choose to focus on the body - simultaneously ephemeral and eternal - which remains our starting point for a dance with the unknown.
In an increasingly secular Western world, where organised religion no longer has a monopoly over experiences deemed mystical, other arenas (some new and others re-discovered) open up. The artists in this show bring together the religious, the psychotropic, scientific mysticism, the symbolic and the archetypical. Whether it is the cathedral of the nightclub or the ascetic purity of material - they open up the question of where one finds the eternal, the sublime and that just beyond the veil.
- Text by Amrita Dhillon
