The pious and the profane may at first seem worlds apart—one immersed in reverent devotion, the other in audacious defiance. Yet they share a potency of feeling that both unsettles and enthralls.
In Pious & Profane, artists Andres Serrano and Barry X Ball delve into this charged duality, drawing upon a visit to the Vatican with a circle of prominent creatives. Serrano—whose infamous Immersion (Piss Christ) once scandalized the art world—was met with a warm reception by Pope Francis, who praised the artists’ pursuit of “harmony and beauty” even through jarring, confrontational work. In these acts, devotion and provocation become inseparable, each sparking a pathway toward transcendence.
For Serrano, the holy and the blasphemous belong in a single continuum of reflection. A selection of his early photographs from the 1980s and early ‘90s is joined here by more recent, intuitive paintings. Signifiers of Christian tradition figure prominently: Pieta II (Immersions) recreates the bowed form of Christ across Mary’s lap, while Ecce Homo (Immersions) bathes a small Jesus figurine in bodily fluids, reimagining what is “ugly” as sublime. This interplay between abjection and reverence heightens an inner friction, inviting the viewer to confront the sanctity hidden within desecration—and vice versa. Serrano’s newer paintings, with their unfettered blasts of color and looser processes, reveal yet another facet of his practice, where intensity of feeling emerges directly from pigment and gesture.
Barry X Ball, meanwhile, unearths the human core within historical saintly iconography. By adapting and modifying classical works, he peels away markers of specific faith or era, suspending his sculptures between idealized purity and haunting imperfection. Influenced by masterpieces such as Antonio Corradini’s La Purità (Dama Velata) and Giusto Le Court’s La Invidia, Ball retains the organic scars in the marble, imbuing these smooth, digitally refined figures with vestiges of natural erosion. Raised among fundamentalist Christians but later awakened by the grandeur of Renaissance art, he treats artmaking itself as a sacred endeavor. Such works have previously shown at Venice’s Ca’ Rezzonico, which sits nearby Patricia Low Contemporary’s gallery in the city.
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