The Dulwich Picture Gallery has announced its 2018 Autumn exhibition will be focusing on the work of Spanish Baroque painter Jusepe de Ribera.
On display from the 26th September 2018, Ribera: Art of Violence will bring together some of the artist’s most sensational and shocking works, in this first UK show devoted to the Spanish artist’s career.
The exhibition will display a selection of Ribera’s eight monumental canvases alongside exceptional drawings and prints exploring the powerful theme of violence in the artist’s work.
Featuring 45 pieces of work by the painter, draughtsman and printmaker the exhibition will be displayed thematically, exploring Ribera’s depictions of saintly martyrdom and mythological violence, skin and the five senses, crime and punishment, and the bound male figure.
The artist is known for his depictions of human suffering, a popular subject for artists during the Catholic Counter-Reformation. He spent much of his career in Naples, where he influenced many Neapolitan masters including Salvator Rosa and Luca Giordano. He is often regarded as the heir to Caravaggio for his dramatic use of light and shadow, and his practice of painting directly from the live model.
Ribera: Art of Violence will explore how his depictions of bodies in pain are neither the product of his supposed sadism nor the expression of a purely aesthetic interest, but involves a artistic, religious and cultural engagement in the depiction of bodily suffering.
The exhibition is curated by Dr Xavier Bray, Director, The Wallace Collection, former Chief Curator, Dulwich Picture Gallery and curator of the 2009 exhibition The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture 1600–1700 (National Gallery, London), and Dr Edward Payne, Head Curator: Spanish Art, The Auckland Project, County Durham, contributor to the catalogue raisonné of Ribera’s drawings (2016) and author of a PhD thesis on the theme of violence in Ribera’s art (2012).
Ribera: Art of Violence will be on display at the Dulwich Picture Gallery from the 26th September 2018 until the 27th January 2019. For more information visit: http://www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk/