Of the few certainties in life, two remain universal: desire and death.

 

In an effort to come to terms with such monumental aspects of the human experience, people throughout the ages have turned to religion, myth, literature, poetry and art as an outlet for expression when other methods have failed them.

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While seemingly at odds with one another, love and death are two sides of the same coin. As powers beyond mortal control, they were ascribed to the gods and in particular, two mythological figures straddled both realms – Eros and Dionysus.

 

Important and powerful, their depiction on funerary vessels illustrate some of the ways death and desire were understood and represented in the ancient world.

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In Death & Desire, a curated selection of monumental pottery centred around Eros and Dionysus are displayed alongside an ancient marble stele, serving as markers of love and death across millennia.

 

As reflections of the loss of human will, they show us how the human preoccupation and fascination with love and death continues and that, while the visual language reflected on these objects may be unfamiliar,
the experiences that motivated them are not.

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Objects on loan from the Koumantatakis Family