SABRINA BOCKLER: IMPENDING RAPTURE
Sabrina Bockler returns to BEERS London for Impending Rapture, her second solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition explores ideas of duality and cyclical change — abundance and scarcity, light and dark, loss and renewal. Impending Rapture refers to the moment of division and continuation, when one form becomes two, when growth depends on disruption, fracture, or surrender.
Comprised of ten paintings, Bockler riffs off Dutch still life and allegorical paintings of the Renaissance, grounding the series in the myth of Persephone as an anchor to explore ideas of descent and return, echoing the rhythms of the seasons and the emotional cycles we move through as human beings. For Bockler, this is a negotiation between beauty and unease, hope and loss, beauty and decay.
Most artists begin with a question or a series of questions. For Bockler, what began as a meditation on transformation soon evolved into interest in how inherited myths shape our understanding of contemporary issues, in this particular case, that of women’s roles. “I find the Persephone story particularly interesting,” she writes, “in that it exhibits obedience, abduction, and defiance into one poetic, wholly unsettling arc.” The act of painting can be many things: comprehension, discovery, deconstruction, restaging, and Bockler is keen to explore a dismantling of a singular so-called meta-narrative: “Painting this story became a retelling,” she explains, “it became about giving Persephone agency while questioning and dismantling the story.”
Those familiar with Bockler’s work will see recurring motifs: abundant pomegranates, shifting snakes, and decadent floral forms. Horses appear as sentinels, psychopomps* moving between uncertain terrain, imbued with a sense of control and mischief. Humour, too. In that wry, sardonic way that echoes John Currin, poking fun at tradition while simultaneously paying homage. What remains interesting in Bockler’s growing lexicon and vision is how beauty and rupture, cycles of pain and joy, and even (lifting the term from an ongoing religious fervour at the time of painting) the sense of “impending rapture” that is horrific, terrific, awesome, and uncanny. Decadent and divine, all things characteristically “Bockler.”
*A figure from mythology, religion, or folklore who guides souls from the world of the living to the world of the dead.
