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Copernicus! Tony Soprano! The inventor of the semicolon! The heroic obsessions of artist Isabel Nolan
Ireland’s artist at the Venice Biennale steals religious imagery for her secular celebrations of scientists and humanists, including an Italian punctuation master – and even TV’s famous mobster
TL;DR
- Isabel Nolan's "Dreamshook" at the Venice Biennale uses religious imagery for secular celebrations.
- The exhibition is inspired by humanist printer Aldo Manuzio, who made books portable and affordable.
- Nolan celebrates scientists and humanists, including Copernicus and Tony Soprano, as fellow humans.
- The artist employs grand visual elements, such as tapestries and bent sculptures, often with a sense of bathos or 'fallen' grandeur.
- Donkeys are used as a symbol of contradictory associations and to ground the work.
- Nolan's retrospective, "Some Fundamental Forces," will open at Southwark Park Galleries in London.
- Nolan is inspired by the 'weaponization of aesthetics' in religious history to communicate powerful ideologies.