MEDIEVAL RELICS

26 contemporary artists respond to the Middle Ages in unique group show. The result is a cabinet of medieval-inspired curiosities - sacred and profane, serious and surreal, traditional and utterly contemporary.

Dates: Monday 16th – Saturday  21st June 2025

Location: The Framing Gallery at Green & Stone, 122 Fulham Road, South Kensington, London SW3 6HU

Opening Hours: 10.00 – 17.00 (Monday - Saturday)

FORWARD BY ALIXE BOVEY

This exhibition is animated by a savoury paradox. Bringing together the work of 26 contemporary artists whose practices respond to medieval art, its title invites us to think about relics, the physical remains of saints and objects believed to be sanctified by contact a holy person. Beyond this restricted sense, the word is used positively as well as pejoratively to signal the antiquity of something (or someone). But of course, the work in this show is anything but ancient: these objects, very much products of our present moment, are not relics in any ordinary sense of the term. These new works remind us that relics themselves, and the associated objects made by medieval artists, were once new: as the saying goes, all art was contemporary once. These artists engage with medieval objects in ways that open up vital questions about the relationship between past and present, demonstrating how the past can be a source of knowledge, inspiration, and wonder

Relics stood at the centre of medieval Christian religious practices. They were sealed inside altar stones, housed in elaborate shrines, and enclosed in fabulously ornate containers. Some where small enough to be worn, concealed in jewellery. Known as reliquaries, precious materials - gold, silver, crystal and other precious stones - were crafted into objects of dazzling opulence, and many included images that proclaimed the significance of the relics they contained. The juxtaposition between such reliquaries and relics themselves can be disquieting: shining gold and gemstones enshrine fragments of bodies (bone, blood, teeth, hair), holy objects (including, at the highest status, those associated with Christ and the Virgin, such as wood from the cross, bits of the crown of thorn, or the Virgin’s tunic), or even stones and soil from holy ground.

 The artists contributing to this show respond to medieval art through materials, techniques, imagery, and ideas. Some have mastered techniques and materials that were used in manuscript illumination and panel painting - egg tempera, gilding with burnished leaves of gold. Others have worked in ceramic, textile, and wood, taking inspiration from secular and sacred iconographies to produce works of art that entangle the past with the present.

In our age of pixels and polymers, these works of art point to the connection of two digital modes, the screen-reliant digital universe and the digits of the hand. Medieval artefacts have been digitised and catalogued by libraries and museums at an incredible rate over the past quarter-century: this has opened up this material to more people than at any time in its history. In academic and museum circles we tend to focus our attention on specialists, students and the curious public, but these artists demonstrate that makers, too, benefit from this work, with new ideas springing from their encounters with medieval art. Yet however important online resources might be, they will never displace the importance of the physical work of art, which inspires and provokes through the direct encounter in time and space.

 As I write this, the National Gallery’s major exhibition of fourteenth-century painting from Siena is in its final weeks (Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350, until 22 June). Enormous audiences have seen this exhibition in New York and London. People have queued up to see, among other wonders, reassembled panels from Duccio’s masterpiece known as the Maestá, astonished by its ability to communicate between its maker in the early 14th-century and viewers in 2025.

Meanwhile, a debate rages about the relevance of art and culture, the value of the humanities, the cost/benefit of investment in arts education. Taken together, the Siena show and the present group of works demonstrates that the future of the past is keenly important, as a source of knowledge and inspiration, as a material demonstration of the ingenious ways that our ancestors organised their societies, used resources, responded to disasters, and reimagined ancient stories and beliefs to suit their own needs.

Alixe Bovey

Professor of Medieval Art History, The Courtauld