Gamwell detects resonances of Mitchell’s dark stars, for example, in Edgar Allan Poe’s short tale, “A Descent Into the Maelstrom,” especially the striking 1919 illustration by Harry Clarke. “For many people when the idea first appeared, this seemed to act as an early analogy for a black hole,” Gamwell said. “At that stage it was a mathematical concept and difficult to picture concretely. Poe in fact imagined a dark star [elsewhere in his writings].”
The works on display cover almost every medium: charcoal and pen-and-ink studies, oil and acrylic paintings, murals, sculptures, both traditional and digital photography, and immersive, room-scale multimedia pieces, including a 2021–2022 installation titled Gravitational Arena by Chinese artist Xu Bing. “Xu Bing’s practice largely revolves around language,” Gamwell noted. For Gravitational Arena, “He takes a Wittgenstein quotation about language and renders it in his own script, shaping the English alphabet to resemble Chinese characters. Then he subjects that text to gravity to form a singularity. [The installation] rises several stories and he covered the gallery floor with a mirror. So when you walk up you get the sense of a wormhole, which he uses as an analogy for translation.”
“Anything near a black hole is violently ripped apart because of its immense gravity—the strongest in the universe,” Gamwell writes about the lasting fascination with black holes in art. “That violence appears in works by artists such as Cai Guo-Qiang and Takashi Murakami, who have used black holes to represent the savagery unleashed by the atomic bomb. The unavoidable pull of a black hole also serves as a ready metaphor for depression in the work of artists like Moonassi. Thus, on one hand, the black hole gives artists a device to express the devastations and anxieties of the modern era. On the other hand, a black hole’s extreme gravity is a source of tremendous energy, and artists such as Yambe Tam invite viewers to accept darkness as a path toward transformation, awe, and wonder.”
Jean-Pierre Luminet/Astronomy and Astrophysics 1979
Among the earliest scientific depictions of a black hole, 1979. Ink on paper, photographically reversed.
Jean-Pierre Luminet/Astronomy and Astrophysics 1979
Courtesy of Fabian Oefner
Fabian Oefner, Black Hole, no. 2, 2014. Inkjet print
Courtesy of Fabian Oefner
Courtesy of Sangho Bang
Sangho Bang, Spaceship, 2018. Digital print
Courtesy of Sangho Bang
Fabian Oefner, Black Hole, no. 2, 2014. Inkjet print
Courtesy of Fabian Oefner
Sangho Bang, Spaceship, 2018. Digital print
Courtesy of Sangho Bang
Courtesy of Eric Heller
Private collection. Photo: Albert Barbu
Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava, Slovakia
Courtesy of Yuxi Cao
Courtesy of John White
