Vim Delvoye stained glass windows

Vim Delvoye
"Chapelle"
Stained glass and metallic chapel
Mudam Luxembourg, 2006

Vim Delvoye is known for his Gothic inspired stained-glass windows and sculptural works made of steel, lead, glass and actual x-rays. In "Chapelle" thousands of x-rays have been applied to the structure's windows using traditional stained glass-making techniques to create a macabre, yet beautiful display of skeletons, bones and teeth. On first inspection some of the windows simply look as though they are made of an abstract design, when upon closer inspection, one can see teeth, intestines, sculls and other anatomical features set against blood red glass. One of the creations show two skeletons in a passionate embrace, hugging and kissing in panels that make up an arched Gothic window, with jeweled stained glass diamonds connecting the panels.

Urs Fischer melting sculptures

Urs Fischer
"Untitled"
Melting wax (2011)

Urs Fischer created a haunting replica in wax of Giambologna's 16th-century sculpture, "The rape of the Sabine women". The original sculpture is housed in the Loggia in Florence and features prominently in the classic film "A room with the view". Fisher ingeniously decided to create a giant slowly melting life-sized sculpture for the 2011 Venice Biennale. Throughout the duration of the Venice Biennale the sculpture slowly melted into nothingness, thereby becoming the ultimate statement on the passage of time. Imbued with their own mortality, his sculptures and installations cultivate the experiential function of art. The melting sculpture challenges the viewer's own notions of mortality, loss, perfection, catastrophe and the sublime. Moreover, what can be more 'gothic' than melting wax?

Olaf Brzeski

Olaf Brzeski

"Dream - spontaneous combustion"

Resin and soot (2008)

If you look around some of the most interesting contemporary art today, exquisite Gothic shadows are everywhere. Olaf Brzeski's installations take place between the poles set by the adherence to the classics and risky experiment, sculpture and drawing, monstrosity and attaining realism through the grotesque. In his "Dream - spontaneous combustion" the artist created a sooty, solid cloud of resin that marks the spot of a spontaneous combustion in one of the basements of an art school. For the artist "fire is nothing but change in the form of matter".

Gothic inspired embroidery

Johan Conradie

"Voices"

Hand-stitched silk embroidery and Swarovski crystals on digital print on paper

103 x 144cm (2014)

Working in various media ranging from oil painting, digital photography to embroidery, Johan Conradie’s highly complex visual surfaces of mostly Gothic architectural elements and baroque sensibilities, merge the three dimensional-space of digital photography with that of hand-stitched embroidery. His digital-generated prints on paper meet direct traces of the artist’s hand through his meticulously hand-stitched embroidery. In the age of digital revolution the artist questions the concept of reality and what is it worth on its own. This is reflected in both his painting and his digitally engendered worlds. Executed with doubts – fuelled by the modern experience of reality, these works gleam with a baroque intensity that occupies a liminal zone, somewhere between digital space and that of material surface splendour. The works engage masculinity and femininity, the ornamental and the conceptual, tradition and technology, mimicry and invention, and abstraction and representation. Ultimately, his work fuses two conceptually gendered worlds, exploiting the tensions between the digital print on paper and that of actual stitching through the photographic print.