Musician and artist Nick Cave will have his first commercial exhibition at the gallery Xavier Hufkens, in Brussels, in 2024. Cave called the work on display “a journey toward some kind of absolution from a series of devastating events.”
Cave was born in Australia in 1957 and has achieved worldwide recognition as a singer, songwriter, author and songwriter. He studied painting at Melbourne's Caulfield Institute of Technology before turning his attention to a musical career that has seen him front bands such as The Birthday Party and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds since the late 1970s. In recent years, Cave has released a book memoir “Faith, Hope and Carnage” and has explored ceramics as a medium.
The exhibition will open in April 2024 and features Cave’s first major visual work, titled “The Devil — A Life (2020–22).” The collection is made up of 17 glazed ceramic figurines that tell the story of the Devil from cradle to grave. Stylistically, the sculptures are reminiscent of the Victorian “flat-back” figurines of Staffordshire, made from the mid-18th century onwards and were popular for display on mantelpieces.
In this new series, Cave frames the character of the Devil as a complex and imperfect everyday character. Told through the series of ceramic figurines, we see how the Devil is born, inherits the world, falls in love, fights a lion, goes to war and is avoided for causing the death of his son, before he himself dies. This arc is reminiscent of Shakespeare's “Seven Ages of Man” from the 1623 comedy “As You Like It”: child, student, lover, soldier, judge, old age and decrepitude. As major changes occur in the Devil's life, his appearance changes, especially the shape of his horns.
Cave has long maintained an intense, if conflicting, interest in Christianity: “I believe in God despite religion, not because of it,” he said in 2010. Over the years, themes related to faith and the Devil have emerged in his songs (“Up Jumped the Devil”, “Jesus Alone”), as well as being included in his first novel, “And the Ass Saw the Angel” from 1989.
In a statement, he characterized the ceramics series that will go to Brussels next year, along with his songs, as centered on “the idea of forgiveness, on the idea that there is a moral virtue in beauty. It’s a kind of balancing of our sins.”
“The Devil — A Life (2020–22)” is currently showing at Xavier Hufkens, 6-8, Sint-Jorisstraat, 1050 Brussels, Belgium, from April 5 to May 11, 2024.
Source: Artnet News