Colnaghi Madrid is pleased to announce its forthcoming exhibition The Danger of Beauty, in collaboration with and curated by Luis Berenguer which explores the shifting meanings and enduring influence of beauty across historic and contemporary art.
Bringing contemporary works by Hamish Pearch, Cece Philips and Liu Bin into dialogue with paintings by El Greco, the Circle of Francisco de Zurbarán, Juan van der Hamen and Juan de Arellano, the exhibition considers beauty as a historically contingent idea, shaped by religious belief, social convention and structures of authority.
Across European art, beauty has served as an expression of divine perfection, an outward sign of virtue and status, and a means through which material abundance might be both celebrated and possessed. Yet such images have always carried an awareness of impermanence: flowers wilt, food decays, bodies age and objects pass from one owner to another. The exhibition traces the survival and transformation of these concerns in contemporary practice, examining the relationships between beauty, desire, ownership and display.
Pearch’s sculptural assemblages test the boundaries between the organic and the manufactured, placing materials in states of apparent instability, growth or deterioration. Philips draws upon portraiture, domestic painting, archival sources and memory to explore the politics of looking, constructing interiors in which intimacy, privacy and power remain unsettled. Liu Bin’s paintings similarly complicate the seductive qualities of the image, revealing beauty as a site of ambiguity rather than certainty.
