Deadline for applications is Tuesday 18 February to attend our free art-writing course, in collaboration with Bergen Kunsthall and Office for Contemporary Art Norway.
As morbid devotional objects go on show at Frieze Masters, one writer asks: why do we look at violent religious art? I was a convent girl, which meant growing up amidst images of pain and grief, the body in all its variegated states of distress. The ground were large and among the rose beds, tennis courts and conker trees werestatues of the Virgin and the saints. Once I fainted in chapel, toppling before the alarmed priest.
The body was a host, a relic, a false refuge; you ate the flesh of Christ and disdained your own. There are no nails in his palms, no chaplet of thorns.
Painted at the end of the 15th century by an unknown Spanish artist, it emphatically displays a corpse. Someone has had the foresight to spread a clean white sheet beneath him. His body is an appalling litany of small wounds, lacerations from a scourge or flail, dabbed here and there with scarlet beads. His eyes roll whitely upwards. His ribcage has been split open. It gapes, obscenely like a lipsticked mouth. Courtesy: Sam Fogg. This ghastly body is flanked by a grieving semicircle of mourners, bent and interlaced like reeds in a breeze.
All six have the same long Byzantine noses and hooded, sorrowful eyes. They are looking and looking, these veiled, haloed figures, gauging the extent of the damage, keening over every mark. Antecedents of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, claiming back their tortured boy.
