Mat Collishaw’s work has explored the paradox of beauty and horror since his graduation from Goldsmiths in the late 1980’s. His new exhibition at Patricia Low Contemporary continues this, looking more intimately at the subject of sacrifice and it’s relationship with art.

Collishaw suggests that ‘in the act of producing any work, there has to be some form of sacrifice, even if only the surrendering of reality to the invention of the artwork’. The reliquary cabinet in his piece titled Invisible Game would have traditionally been used as a means of preserving and venerating the physical remains of Saints. An end has to be met (that of the saint) before the cabinet can function, and Collishaw lures the viewer in to witness the impending sacrifice of the sufferer; a trapped fawn, helplessly awaiting it’s fate. The burning flower and butterfly photographs depict a similar dependency, the very process of their production demanding the demise of the subject, of beauty thwarted by the flames. The 19th century altarpiece in Performance plays host to a myriad of butterflies that are also struck by a similar fate. The fire heightens the mesmerising quality of this vignette, and the art is created at the moment of loss.