In September 2001 at a press conference for the Hamburg Music festival the avant-garde German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was asked to comment on the 9/11 attacks. They were, he said, "Lucifer¹s Greatest works of Art”, a remark which led to widespread criticism as well as to the cancellation of his upcoming tour.

In this now infamous statement, Stockhausen alludes to the visual impact of stilled representations of major world events, acknowledging the split between the reality of momentous happenings and their visual representation. Such representations (often seen on TV with backlighting, transparency and luminous colour) resonate with us not least because they refer back to a whole bank of artistic images depicting suffering and torment, heroic forbearance and self-sacrifice, hell and the apocalypse.

This exhibition explores the way that both artistic and media images relating to key or extreme political events often manifest a sense of transcendence, even a beauty (at once overwhelming and terrible), altogether different to the reality of the event itself. In the 18th and 19th centuries grand portrayals of historical events came to form the genre referred to as history painting. These were typically works of propaganda that used a range of evocative painterly techniques (many of them taken from religious paintings of the past) to aggrandize social and political events. A famous example is Benjamin
West’s The Death Of General Wolfe (1770), a portrait in which the general is presented and lit in the style of a classical Pieta in order to stress an underlying moral message.

The artists in this exhibition are, in a sense, continuing this tradition. They too enlist motifs and create atmospheres that relate to the epic and the sublime in order to engage the sympathies of the viewer. One key difference, however, lies in their relationship to the state. These artists are not dutifully rehearsing state sponsored messages or striving to take the sting out of a grim reality. Rather their works elicit an aesthetic response towards world events that have a personal resonance for each of them, meaning the message transcends the purely didactic.

Another significant difference lies in the visual language of these artists, which is influenced not solely by paintings of the past, but also by contemporary popular culture. Some even point to cinematic blockbusters such as Star Wars and The Lord of The Rings trilogy, which themselves have borrowed traditional painterly ideas updated and given new life for their new audiences. Therefore both traditional painting and contemporary technologies converge to inform artistic responses.

Whilst the images in this show draw on actual events, they equally deviate from factual reality to use the pictorial vocabularies of hell and damnation, of heaven and salvation, and of tragedy and sacrifice to re-present history in spectacular and persuasive form.