Christ Today: Fascination. Christ. Experience.
The enthralling exhibition documents a never-ending artistic quest to encounter Jesus Christ, and the impossibility of representing His dual nature. Makis Warlamis’s paintings reflect the profundity of the 2,000-year-old story and integrate fragmentary images by such great masters as El Greco, Velázquez, Caravaggio, Raphael and Rubens. The main works conform to the accounts of the synoptic evangelists. Multiple events, in one example the Crucifixion, the Entombment and the Mocking of Christ, are skillfully combined on a single canvas.
Warlamis calls his image of Christ “an ongoing synthesis of depictions extending over two millennia. The result is an image of Christ that is in a constant state of vibration, like an endless projection of thousands of images from the past.”
There are some 200 images of Christ on display. Visitors are encouraged to discover their own. Because Christ is not always fully visible, the viewer must seek to discern Him.
In this complex multimedia exhibition, Warlamis’s extraordinary paintings are complemented by works by Austrian artists Eleonore Hettl, Wilhelm Kollar and Hans Sisa, and by sculptures created on site, under Warlamis’s supervision, by exchange students from the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Objects, performances, installations and films are also included.
- Project organizer: Makis Warlamis
- Curators, graphic design: Bernhard Antoni, Ruth Schremmer
- Artists: Heide Warlamis, Makis Warlamis, Eleonore Hettl, Wilhelm Kollar, Hans Sisa; Radu Handru, Vlad Berte and Darius Hulea, University of Art and Design, Cluj-Napoca
- Film, video, photography: Dimitris Protopsaltou, Karin Antoni