Created during his residency at The National Gallery and exhibited in the ensuing exhibition Saints Alive, Michael Landy’s Kinetic Martyrdom, 2013 is a delicate collage of saintly imagery. Landy is inspired by Renaissance artists such as Carlo Crivelli and Lucas Cranach the Elder among others, and these works explore the disjointed way saints’ bodies emphasized, what critic Laura Cumming called ‘a votive limb, a disembodied yet ever-beating heart’ (L. Cumming, ‘Michael Landy: Saints Alive – review’, The Guardian, May 25, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/may/26/michael-landy-saints-alive-national-review). Evoking both Surrealism’s exquisite corpses as well as Victorian collage, Kinetic Martyrdom is a striking exploration of figuration, an evanescent yet fragmentary body set against a halo of white paper.
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