Albrecht Dürer is recognized as one of the greatest artists of the Northern Renaissance, both for his mastery of media and his uncanny ability to create evocative pieces with messages and beauty that echo through the ages and still draw people in today. He was a master of woodcut and copperplate engraving as forms of printmaking, and when you look at pieces like Melancholia I or Knight, Death, and the Devil it’s hard to not be moved by the subject matter and the emotions behind it. While the man himself has been dead for some 500 years, his art lives on, and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (AGGV) has a surprising amount of his prints, a selection of which have been chosen by its chief curator Steven McNeil for Dangerous Beauty.
The prints have a provenance as strange as some of the subject matter. According to McNeil, a collection of Dürer prints was bequeathed to the gallery in the ’70s by a Viennese couple who moved to Victoria. Since then, McNeil’s interest in Dürer’s work has led him overseas.
“The Getty put on a scholarly seminar in England that was specifically for curators of collections that included prints by Dürer,” he says. “After applying, I was the only Canadian curator who got the funding to go, so I spent a week at The British Museum with a lot of Dürer scholars, and it was a great way to wrap my mind around working on [this exhibit].”
Dangerous Beauty is part of a broader focus that the AGGV is taking on the material, the tools, and the media used to create these works.
“I thought it would be cool to be able to focus right in, so we will have magnifying glasses in the gallery, so that people can take a really close look at the prints and think more about his process,” he says. “We have quite a few really different shows coming up, but there is going to be this thread of really looking at the processes that carry through them.”
McNeil is a keen observer of the ties that bind us all together, and this show is no exception.
“What I tried to do was to think about how we can look at Dürer’s work in a contemporary perspective that would be of interest to people, because I find them fascinating. A lot of the subject matter is deeply rooted in the European perspective, as well as being based on the Catholic religion.”
This makes sense, as Dürer was both European and Catholic, but McNeil says that “once you look beneath those layers, all the themes that you see in these subject matters are really relatable, regardless of what your cultural background or your religious beliefs are.”
McNeil says that while there are scenes of extraordinary beauty in these pieces, they also have an unsettling depth uncommon of Dürer’s period.
“Dürer was also quite radical for that time [because he was] creating subjects that showed the raw danger and humanity of these biblical stories, without prettying them up,” he says. “There are monstrous figures and a lot of impending doom… apocalyptic thinking. There is a darkness to what is going on in [our] world, and I don’t want to bring people down, but there’s a connection between these works of art and the ability to think about things critically and wrestle with uncomfortable realities.”
Dangerous Beauty
Until Sunday, May 3
Art Gallery of Greater Victoria
aggv.ca