Mat Collishaw
Visual Artist
‘His art is lovely and vile. It is an art of our time and it hits true’
‘The beautiful and the bloodthirsty, the cruel and the subtle, the pornographic and the spiritual, the alluring and the repulsive all meet in photos, films and sculptures that conjure up disturbingly mismatched responses’
Mat Collishaw came to public attention in the 1980s as part of the Young British Artists circle, alongside artists such as Damian Hurst and Tracy Emin, revolutionising the art world. He has since gone on to international acclaim with work that covers a wide variety of subject matters and media.
His works have been exhibited in collections around the world including, Tate, Somerset House, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Galleria Borghese, Rome, Bass Museum of Art, Florida, Galeria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna, Italy; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville, Paris and Brooklyn Museum, New York.
His most recent exhibitions include The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, St Nicholas’ Church, Ghent, Belgium (2020–2021); Mat Collishaw, Djanogly Gallery, Lakeside Arts, Nottingham, UK (2020–2021) and The End of Innocence, Fundació Sorigué, Lleida (2019–2020).
He recently turned his attention to working with classical music with Sky Burial, a powerful meditation on man’s relationships with both death and nature, which is accompanied by a live performance of Fauré’s Requiem.
Images from Sky Burial
‘Art is there to engage with you and to make you think and feel things. Classical music, like a lot of art that was made before the 20th century, gets put into the zone of being something that socially sophisticated people do as a recreation, and not something that’s alive, revolutionary and life changing. And yet, classical music has the capacity to move and transform people like no other music. When you’re in a concert hall with an 80-piece orchestra and a 60-piece choir, it’s so powerful to have those vibrations resonating through you. If I can create something on top of that, that takes people to another place, I hope it can be an extremely powerful artistic tool and it might make classical music more inviting for people who wouldn’t normally go.’
