(Re)Birth of Venus: Renaissance Painting 2.0

Beautiful blonde waves, a gracile nude female figure and a mythical scallop shell - In the mid 1480s, the Italian artist Sandro Botticelli changed the art world with his tempera masterpiece The Birth of Venus. His Italian Renaissance artwork set new standards for fine art and inspired artists all over the world in the centuries that followed.

Almost 540 years later, in (Re)Birth of Venus - Renaissance Painting 2.0 some of todays most talked about contemporary artists take a deeper look at Botticelli's masterpiece and reinterpret the mythical moment of the goddess’ arrival on land after her birth. As part of a Renaissance revival in this day and age, painting, sculpture, craftmanship and street art merge together in this show.

[H]aving moved around a fair bit in the past few years, I’m now coming to realise that painting people I know well is a way to keep them close.

 – Sophie Vallance, 2021

I think that my navigation of my own state of being is like an ebb and flow, that moves and changes, and I think of my practice as an artist in exactly the same way. Often looking back at paintings I made some time ago, I can see them clearer than the time in which I made them, it’s amazing how charged with meaning or feeling they can be, that I wasn’t even aware of before, and how they make sense only in retrospect. Always moving forward within the practise is vital for me, I would rather not make art at all than make repetitive or formulaic work, that isn’t searching for growth. 

– Sophie Vallance, 2018

I'm not interested in painting nice and beautiful. To me, ugly is beautiful.

- Madsaki, 2018

The smiley faces and dripping eyes came from laziness. I was painting the Mona Lisa, which was my first Wannabie, and at a certain point I thought, fuck it, and painted the smiley face on it. But when you put these faces on these figures, it could be anybody. It’s up to the viewer to put their own image onto that face.

- Madsaki, 2021

I was interested in painting from the time I was three years old. I didn’t suddenly decide to be an artist. I remember drawing on my crib wall with my sister, and spilling blue ink on a silk-covered chair in our house. My mother, after she discovered it, had to paint the whole chair the color of the ink.

- Judy Rifka

Studying the sources on the birth of Venus and its pictorial iconography, I decided to represent the very birth of the goddess in relation to its origin, which is the castration of Uranus and which is generally omitted in pictorial interpretations.

A large part of my process focuses on that push and pull between painting in areas and taking them away again, looking for harmony. I realized part of what was interesting about my work, especially when referencing the Old Masters, was what was absent, removed, ambiguous or intangible. The interplay between the recognisable and the unrecognisable has the potential to create interesting new perspectives, a kind of uncanny beauty. I hope that the space created between moments of understanding and not understanding triggers a pause for the viewer, during which you are creating and adding your own reading. That pause allows your conversation with a piece of work to necessarily be longer, it gives time for contemplation.

- Jake Wood-Evans, 2020