Delphine Somers: At The Wunderwall Antwerp

Delphine Somers is an artist living and working in Brussels. Her painting practice deals with the fine line between the motives and archetypes that surface in myth, religion, the dreamworld, and history, on the one hand, and the acutely contemporary, societal, and culturally specific, on the other. It explores the interplay between a complex, ever-changing social reality and the patterns that keep appearing in human behaviour throughout history. In her choice of subjects, she is often drawn to familiar, widely circulated narratives and the ways in which they influence the psyche.

 

For the Wunderwall, she will present a selection of works from a series she started making in 2022, based on the 16th-century Augsburg manuscript. The Augsburg manuscript contains accounts and descriptions of miraculous signs that have been observed throughout history, starting in Old Testament times and continuing through Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Late Middle Ages, right up to the middle of the 16th century.

 

The signs and miracles are interpreted as announcing the Second Coming of Christ, the Last Judgement, and the future kingdom of God. It contains miraculous signs not just from the time of the creation of humankind up to its own day, but also those expected at the end of the world. This series adds a range of future social, political, mystical, and humorous miracles. These future miracles don’t lead up to the Second Coming of Christ, nor will they open the kingdom of God. However, they use an age-old form of reporting to comment on the present through the lens of the distant future, describing the cyclical nature of history.