Philippe Favier, Hervé Graumann, Kevin Francis Gray, Markus Hansen, Rosie Leventon & Kate Street

Emerging in the sixteenth century, Vanitas are pictorial representations exploring the triumph of death and the futility of human activities. A theme regularly revisited throughout the centuries, what have vanitas become today? What remains of the philosophical, theological and moral symbols of this baroque model? Freed from their ancestral codes, contemporary vanitas still inevitably recall the certainty of death and the passing of time. Whereas baroque vanitas conveyed an exacerbated fear of death, their contemporary counterparts are today evocative of desensitized allegories attesting to our neutralized concern towards mortality. Defined by a freedom of interpretation caused by their desacrilization and secularization, contemporary vanitas today present heterogeneous proposals - from the revisiting of certain symbols of the classical vanitas through a personal language, to the presentation of works which offer a psychological approach to the subject, ultimately placing the viewer in a state of affective awareness.