Nathan Cash Davidson - Contemporary Artists

So It Is Decreed And So It Shall Be Done

So It Is Decreed And So It Shall Be Done The Saatchi Gallery
 

Nathan Cash Davidson

So It Is Decreed And So It Shall Be Done

2010
Oil on canvas

163 x 122.5 cm

Henry VIII strides out of the painting, his unwieldy gold chain glittering, his eyes staring glassily ahead, a severed female head held aloft behind him, and seems to intone the title of the painting itself - So It Is Decreed And So It Shall Be Done. If the title seems a bit too extravagantly theatrical to be genuine Tudor, it’s because it is: Henry’s dead eyes and tumbling jowls are those of his Madame Tussauds mannequin, painted by Nathan Cash Davidson in a style of semi-detached sarcasm. In Davidson’s paintings, historical and imagined narratives are told as though half-heard, half-understood, but the space in his works is conversely overstuffed, both gesturally and pictorially, like the dummy Henry with his enormous shoulders.
 
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