ART: Rosamond Purcell- the Elegiac Macabre Genre

ROSAMOND PURCELL - THE ELEGIAC MACABRE GENRE

An artist that has distilled the zeitgeist of Cornell, 1800's Cabinets of Curiosities, Keifer, taxidermy, and who summons connections to other artists for me.  

Rosamond Purcell, Dante's Inferno

Keifer often uses open books with marred and/or unreadable surfaces.  I think they reveal a trope for the scrutiny and guilt or lack of it, that Germany and its people endure as burden and shame for their particular history. 

Anselm Keifer

David Maisel's photographs of an Oregon insane asylum are the haunting stuff of nightmares and horror films.  Many inmate/patients died and their cremated remains were left unclaimed and unidentified on shelves in cans for many years, after the asylum was closed and abandoned.

David Maisel 

This haunting early work of feminism I found reduced me to emotional stone when I saw them at LACMA many years ago.  Dead bird bodies have been given knitted pancho/shrouds and lain out for an eternal and final view.

Annette Messenger

Joseph Cornell, Untitled, (Hôtel de la Duchesse Anne de Nantes), 1957
Art Institute of Chicago

And we can't overlook the supreme royal of this group, Cornell - the boxes.  Memory box windows into the past, the tomb, the grave, the mind of darkness and grief.