for Art & Christianity, no. 116 Winter 2023. p. 12
All Saint’s Chapel, 82–83 Margaret Street, London
Curated by Beth Greenacre, with Louise Bourgeois, Gideon Rubin, and Nicolas Godin
from 28th September until 27th October 2023
A set of portraits of the artist Louise Bourgeois (1911 - 2010) lines the walls of the spiral staircase that connects the ground floor entrance of the All Saints Convent to its chapel on the upper level. These few colour photographs serve as a prelude to what will be explored within. Throughout her career Bourgeois has explored, with wit and humour, a great span of human conditions, from sexuality and the body, through pain and suffering, to death and unconscious. As I ascend the set of stairs, this visual preamble gives me glimpses of Bourgeois’ perennial themes, reinforcing my impression of her work before I have even entered the exhibition space.
Her totemic figure, Brother & Sister, 1949, dominates the central axis of the space, elevated to the position where the altar once stood. This figure, a combination of bronze and stainless steel, reads as a human couple embracing with opposite and mutually perpetuating forces. Bourgeois' primal forms seem to contain a chaotic material energy. She is able to organise formless matter by bringing together opposing active forms and more receptive elements. This double shape, somehow both leaf and wing, is accompanied by four life-size paintings by Gideon Rubin (b. 1973) of women in simple pale blue dresses, their faces devoid of any detail or features. On the chapel's lower level and to one side, stands Bourgeois' Women with a Secret, 1947 - 1949, a white-painted bronze figure reminiscent of Giacometti's emaciated figurations.
In a third work by Bourgeois, Arch of Hysteria, 2000, a doll figure sewn in pink fabric is suspended horizontally in the air; she is flanked by two further paintings by Rubin. For Bourgeois, verticality is often a parable for our attempts to escape the patriarchal complex, while horizontality implies a more resigned attitude. By hanging this small contorted figure just above the viewers’ eye-level the artist also brings the observing body into the sculpture.
Rubin's canvasses positioned informally and at a diagonal to the axis of the chapel on simple wooden legs, fill the remaining space. Entire areas of the canvas are minimally painted in neutral tones, and these become a visual 'breathing space' around the figures.
Nicolas Godin’s newly created soundscape is the third element of this exhibition, reverberating against the floral ceramic tiles and wooden seats, on the walls and stained-glass windows that decorated the chapel. When I visited, the chapel was filled with visitors to the extent that it was difficult to find a space where I could become immersed in Godin’s musical installation. Nonetheless, this should perhaps be expected, and indeed welcomed, in a chapel-as-exhibition-space where a lively gathering created communion between different artworks and agencies.
In its disparate parts and as a whole, the exhibition comlements the chapel's east wall painting, Crucifixion, 1861, by the Victorian artist John Richard Clayton (of Clayton and Bell) in which all the depicted attendant saints are women. Originally constructed as a convent, in 1914, with the chapel at its rear, this was the first purpose-built place of worship for the Society of All Saints Sisters of the Poor. The chapel is now owned by Unity Real Estate, a London based investor, developer and property manager. It is appropriate that, while the future of this former convent is being explored, with plans afoot for a new residential community on the site, the chapel should host this exhibition dealing with memory, loss and transformation. These artworks, which explore the erasure of identity and the morphing of form under strain, offer an eloquent parallel to the life of this unique space within the urban fabric.
London, October 2023
Rui G. Cepeda