NYAB Event - Patrick McGrath "Syncretisms"

Patrick McGrath "Syncretisms"

Witzenhausen Gallery

This event has ended.

In this work, I have appropriated and reinterpreted various belief systems and merged them into a new syncretism for my own use. With this, I intend to re-create and explore a “new” world where the myths, gods and monsters of today’s “globalized” world co-exist with ancient mythologies preserved within Christian tradition. By making reference to our consumerist culture, a consumed ecology, “free” market mentalities and migration. I pretend to draw my own map of the world. In this created world I explore the recurring archetypes and themes still present in our culture all covered by the mass media with its spectacles, shows and televised wars.

By making use of the “retablo” painting format I intend to emulate universal forms associated with Christian art. By updating the classical pantheon of gods and saints with traditional oil painting techniques I deal with the world we live in today. The seven altarpieces I have constructed convey the idea of the seven planets or Greco-Roman gods that stand for the days of the week and combine these with the Roman Catholic iconography of the saints. In order to make them relevant to our global age, I have inserted in each one of them, signs and symbols that remind us of some of our current “world issues” based upon personal associations I found between the gods, saints and these issues.

This syncretism is born out of a deep concern to find unity and a connection between the old and new, both at a personal and global level. Through the use and recontextualization of religious iconography and mythological imagery derived from Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman cultures I am able to understand, study and reinterpret today’s “Globalized” world with its issues, controlled by the media and corporate machinery, in a different light.