Aurel Schmidt’s Body Swallows World is inspired, in part, by Théodore Rousseau’s The Forest in Winter at Sunset (c1846-67) in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where the artist lives and works.
Rousseau’s painting– a huge and gloomy autumnal scene, with complex interlacing of tree branches and roots – provided a template for Schmidt’s investigation of landscape as both external terrain and projection of the inner life of the body. Taking its title from Mikhail Bakhtin’s 1940s book Rabelais and his World (in which the author discusses the carnivalesque, a chaotic celebration of bodily sensuality), Schmidt’s work treads a fine balance between the grotesque and the refined. A meticulously rendered sylvan scene of dense woodland at the edge of a still lake dissolves into teeming life on closer inspection.
That delicate forest floor in gentle ochres and greys is, in fact, a carpet of squirming maggots; what looked like a tree stump is a huge curl of turd, with inquisitive fly; fat, intestinal caterpillars dangle from the branches, like anacondas. As an allegory of worldly decay, Schmidt’s work embeds the horror of human decomposition in an image of its opposite: the bucolic, regenerative landscape of Rousseau’s Romantic escapism. But Bakhtin’s carnival is here too: there’s a wild and gleeful celebration at the heart of Schmidt’s work, with its festoons of squiggling creepy-crawlies standing in for streamers and bunting, a party at the end of the world where no-one gets out alive.

Save Your Cart
Share Your Cart
0
    0
    Your Cart
    Your cart is emptyReturn to Shop

    Search the Saatchi Gallery website

    Thank you for your enquiry!

    Your message was sent and one of our Admin team will respond as soon as possible.

    If you have an urgent question, please call our front desk on 020 7811 3070.

    For more information on how we store and use your data please view our privacy policy here. You can unsubscribe from our newsletters at any time by clicking on the links below the emails we send you.

    Essential Information Before Your Visit:
    Click Plan Your Visit for full information on upcoming closures.

    Register for email updates
    Be the first to hear about the latest Saatchi Gallery exhibitions, events, offers and news