Gothic Modern at the Ateneum

After having a bite to eat we headed to our third Art museum of the day. We went to the Ateneum - Helsinki’s main art gallery - to see the Gothic Modern exhibition. The place was packed. “Why?”, you may ask. The rain obviously brought people indoors but, like Kiasma, it was also free on the first Friday of the month.

We decided to tackle the Gothic Modern exhibition first and then have a look at the permanent exhibition. It was so crowded it was a bit overwhelming to start with, but once we found our groove we were able to weave in and out of the crowds. It was an excellent exhibition, very extensive and contained quite a few works by Edvard Munch, a favourite of mine, and also a Van Gogh.

“Gothic Modern - From Darkness to Light” presents a new approach to modern art. The exhibition focuses on the untold story of how some artists from the late 19th to early 20th centuries reimagined and recreated the Gothic. It was broken up into several areas: - “Journeys to the Gothic” focused on the turn of the 20th century, which was characterised by rapid change, technological development, societal transformation, the collapse of empires and outbreak of wars, very much like our current time. Artists turned towards medieval and German art to find ways to articulate their experiences. The exhibition takes you on a journey along the threshold of past and present, examining ideas of individual, gender and transnational community, entwined with the dark, the emotive and the uncanny. These issues were the subject of intense deliberation a hundred years ago, and they have not lost any of their relevance in the contemporary world.

Dance of Death (Danse Macabre or Totentanz) is one of the central iconographies that modern artists adapted from Medieval and early Renaissance traditions. The theme presents an allegorical ‘dance’ of the living with death portrayed as a skeleton figure. In Gothic imagery, the skeletons guide the living to a dance with a grip that is at times forceful, and at times gentle. Horror and loneliness are more prominent in modern interpretations, but they often also reflect a sense of dark humour and become a lens on the underside of modern social realities.Read more