Digital pigment and silkscreen print on Hahnemuehle Baryta FB Gloss
Image size: 21 x 25.3cm
Paper size: 29.7 x 34.5 cm
Edition of 30, signed and numbered
Gareth Cadwallader has created Gaudi, 2022 especially for Whitechapel Gallery on the occasion of The London Open, 2022 30 June – 4 September 2022.
Gaudi, 2022 takes its starting point from a drawing made by the artist in 2006, of a relief sculpture entitled Death of The Righteous, from Gaudi's Sagrada Família cathedral in Barcelona. The sculpture shows a young woman holding a baby at the bedside of a dying man. This drawing, which has hung in Cadwallader's home for years, has recently taken on a new and unexpected significance, when earlier this year, the artist's father died a few weeks before the birth of his first child.
In the process of making the edition, the carved letters in the backdrop of the sculpture have evolved into a kind of church rood screen, and the mother and child figures have multiplied and become like a figment of the dying man's imagination, or a dream he is having. The hillside in the background evokes a romantic landscape, and is the place where the artist's father's ashes are scattered.
Like Cadwallader's paintings, the composition appears to have evolved through a convergence of imagery, evoking an eclectic mix of different genres, from still life to landscape, hyperrealism and surrealism. Cadwallader has used this print as a preparatory work for a painting he will make of the same image.
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