inspirations from the ancients

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Notwithstanding the endless search for novelty in the contemporary art world culminating recently in the NFT mania, there are various serious, dedicated, artists who both acknowledge their debt to a distinguished earlier artistic culture and, even more impressively, utilise it as an inspiration to make contemporary artwork thereby also renewing and reinvigorating the link between the past and the present.

The Iranian artist Shiva Ahmadi has continually used the world of Persian miniatures as a primary source of inspiration for her highly politicised artworks. Blessed with a technical ability which enables her to take on such a rarefied and refined tradition without any visual awkwardness, the final work, on an initial, superficial gaze, appears to be a straightforward ‘homage’. 

The Romanian artist Teodora Axente’s highly ornate paintings bear a clear debt to the Dutch fifteenth and sixteenth century panel painting tradition. Renowned for their exquisite detailing and complex pictorial structures, Axente has taken all this on but also given her portraits a surreal, psychological tension, where characters appear to be human beings but actually, mysteriously, become animals, or have animals growing out of them.

The Chinese painter Lu Chao’s works are influenced by the master calligraphers of the Yuan Dynasty (1271 - 1368). However, as with the other artist’s in the exhibition, Lu Chao’s ‘homage’ is no slavish adoption of a previous technique, but merely an attention towards the beauty and power of the gesture, although in his own works, at the service of figuration and not abstraction.

Qingzhen Han will be the other Chinese artist in the exhibition and although her practice is heavily influenced in a similar way to Lu Chao, her works embrace abstraction. Whereas Lu Chao’s works almost exclusively in black and white, Han has highly delicate, but an extremely rich colour palette to her works. Heavily influenced by Zen Buddhism, each individual gesture has a significance in the general architecture of the whole, as does the concept of space within the work.

The Japanese artist Keita Miyazaki has, over the last few years, made a series of ‘Vanitas’ metal cases which began their existence as a ‘homage’ to the seventeenth century Dutch paintings which developed into a renowned tradition in the way these exquisitely made works with their skulls, partially eaten fruit, jewels depicted human vanity in its metaphorical portrayal of the accumulation of wealth and its uselessness as a defence against the fragility of existence.

The Italian artist Nicola Samorì’s paintings are influenced by the Italian baroque in general, but also by the whole of Italian artistic tradition. There are three works in the exhibition, two of which are Samorì’s working faithfully with the process of ‘fresco’.

All 6 artists in the exhibition have used an ancient tradition but not just as a way of finding inspiration, but instead as a way of commenting on that same tradition by absorbing it and then giving their works a highly contemporary slant which, contemporaneously, maintains the tradition alive and still today of fundamental relevance.