Set out on a visual journey of art inspired by black holes

Gamwell detects traces of Mitchell’s dark stars, for example, in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “A Descent Into the Maelstrom,” notably in Harry Clarke’s striking 1919 illustration. “When the idea first circulated, many readers took that image as an early metaphor for a black hole,” Gamwell said. “At that stage it was largely a mathematical notion and hard to visualise. Poe, in other texts, did in fact imagine a dark star.”

The exhibited works cover almost every medium: charcoal sketches, pen-and-ink illustrations, oil and acrylic paintings, murals, sculpture, both traditional and digital photography, and expansive room-sized multimedia pieces — for example, the 2021–2022 installation Gravitational Arena by Chinese artist Xu Bing. “Xu Bing’s practice is largely concerned with language,” Gamwell noted. For Gravitational Arena, “He borrows a remark about language from Wittgenstein and recasts it in his own script, rendering the English alphabet to resemble Chinese characters. He then subjects that script to a force like gravity to create a singularity. The work rises several stories and the gallery floor is mirrored. So when you walk up you encounter something like a wormhole, which he uses as a metaphor for translation.”

“Anything drawn close to a black hole is torn apart by its enormous gravity — the most powerful force in the universe,” Gamwell writes about the lasting attraction of black holes for artists. “We see that destruction in the works of artists such as Cai Guo-Qiang and Takashi Murakami, who have employed black holes to evoke the violence of the atomic bomb. The unavoidable pull of a black hole also works as an apt image for depression in the art of creators like Moonassi. Thus, on one side the black hole gives artists a symbol to convey modern devastation and anxiety. On the other side, its extreme gravity is a source of vast energy, and artists such as Yambe Tam ask viewers to accept darkness as a route to transformation, wonder, and awe.”