Atalanta Xanthe ‘AGE GAP (1494-2024)

ALICE BLACK is thrilled to present Atalanta Xanthe ‘Age Gap: 1494-2024’, the artist's second solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition is on view through 13 December 2024 at 7 Windmill Street, London, W1T 2JD.

Born in England in 1996 and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Xanthe now lives and works in London, having spent seven years in New York. A graduate of the University of Oxford's Ruskin School of Art, she earned her MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2018, where she became the youngest Fellow (2018-2019). Xanthe’s work is part of the permanent collections of the Ruth Borchard Collection, UK, The Girl Power Collection, UK, and the Marval Collection, Italy.

Xanthe’s latest series, Age Gap: 1494-2024, uses the medieval prayer book Book of Hours as both a visual and conceptual foundation. Popular between the 13th and 16th centuries and traditionally read by women in private chambers these manuscripts were an early form of female agency, forming the only physical asset a woman could legally hold during this time.

The exhibition consists of 20 small-scale paintings and accompanying drawings, presented as a fictional collaboration between Xanthe and 15th-century illuminator Stephan Schriber, who’s unfinished sketchbook she discovered at the Bavarian State Library, Germany. Structured to be experienced painting by painting, the tone of the exhibition reflects the medieval experience of reading the Book of Hours, the pages of which displayed serious biblical texts about love, death and meaning within elaborate borders of flowers, fornication and anthropomorphic animals.

Xanthe’s paintings, like their mediaeval forebears, ignore modernist separations between serious and decorative, contemplative and humorous, transcendent, and the absurd.

Many of Xanthe's paintings begin with the decorative border depicted in Schriber's original drawings—some are meticulously transcribed, while others are collaged and adapted, with colours and compositions altered to reflect her narrative. The intricate borders frame main images which are inspired by a second source: marginalia from Books of Hours found in institutions such as the Morgan Library, New York (USA) and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (UK). These small marginal images are transformed and reimagined as not peripheral, but predominant. Through Xanthe's willfully idiosyncratic interpretation, they become what she refers to as ‘biblically-inflected psychodramas’, playful, violent, and uncanny portraits of herself and her relationships. The symbolic language of 15th Century Catholicism is here transfigured into a set of emotional hieroglyphics.

Xanthe is intrigued by the parallels between art, sex, and prayer. As the historian Eamon Duffy writes in ‘Marking the Hours’, “the history of prayer…is as difficult to write as the history of sex, and for some of the same reasons. Both activities are intensely personal and in the nature of things not readily accessible to objective analysis”. ‘You can swap ‘sex’ with ‘art’ and the meaning still holds’, Xanthe says. She envisions these themes interacting within what she calls “a Bermuda triangle of irreducibility.”

Though grounded in centuries-old imagery, these paintings are timeless in their northern-renaissance technique and fresh in their reflections on navigating romance, friendship and hierarchy as a young woman.

"I like the idea of sex, art, and prayer, all hanging out in the bermuda triangle of irreducibility." - Atalanta Xanthe

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