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Commissions:

• Institute of Advanced Study: Being Human
• Stations of the Cross
• Gollon At Henley

Stations of the Cross

Unveiling by Bishop of London (photo courtesy Lauren Manning)

Having been permanently installed, Chris Gollon's 14 Stations of the Cross were then blessed by the Bishop of London on Thursday 26th March 2009. Since there is no stained glass, they have added great colour and movement to the church interior. They also provide an active aid to worship and have transormed the Church of St John on Bethnal Green into a major visitor attraction in East London. Located next to the Museum of Childhood and literally above Bethnal Green Underground Station, the Church is open to visitors Mon-Thurs 12-2pm, Saturdays 10-1pm, or during services. For information on award-winning novelist Sara Maitland's book 'Stations of the Cross', entirely inspired by Chris Gollon's Stations of the Cross, and also a special Collectors Edition (signed book + silk-screen print edition of 100), please click here.

In 2001, and widely featured on television news and in the national press, Chris Gollon was commissioned to paint fourteen Stations of the Cross for a grade-one listed church in London, designed by Sir John Soane. Located next to the Museum of Childhood, St. John on Bethnal Green was built in 1828. One of only three churches he designed, it is considered the most typical example of Soane's late mature style. The church has recently received substantial funding from English Heritage toward its renovation.

Due to funding coming only sporadically, this historic commission took Chris Gollon 8 years to complete. However, thanks to the great efforts of the congregation, Christian charities and the generosity of Chris Gollon's collectors and supporters, (as well as Chris Gollon working at cost) the series of 14 paintings is now completed. They were unveiled and placed on easels for use in the Good Friday service 2008, which swelled the congregation five fold in a very moving service, and attracted excellent reviews in the national press and Radio 4's The Today Programme. Now installed permanently, and used a first time in the 2009 Good Friday service in their site- specific locations, they work to re-create Jesus's last journey, both as an active aid for worship in a working church, as well as providing an attraction to visitors to this beautiful, historic church building. Gollon's paintings of the 14 Stations of the Cross will also be a unique series in art history, since they vary in size and are actually site specific. To increase the emotional potential, Chris has taken the unusual step of using his own son as the model for Jesus and his daughter as Mary.

For the positioning of each painting, Chris Gollon and Fr Alan Green (Church Rector and Area Dean, Tower Hamlets) liaised with architect Robin Mallalieu (Brady & Mallalieu), who is overseeing the restoration. For example, in the neo-classical vestibule, which is typical Soane, with its imposing vertical elevation and columns, are placed the first two Stations: 'Jesus is Condemned to Death' and 'Jesus Takes Up His Cross'. This is doubly appropriate because the architecture has the solemnity of a courtroom, and these are the only two Stations which occur in private. From there the Stations proceed as if now in public along the sunlit southern nave and on around the entire church.

This exciting project has been a unique collaboration between an artist and a priest. Although Chris Gollon had his own ideas, he nonetheless leant heavily on Fr Alan Green for the theology. Two Stations have been funded by the Jerusalem Trust, and one by the Christian Arts Trust. Although Tower Hamlets is a very poor borough, one Station was funded by the congregation, and others by individual patrons or Gollon collectors, including 'Station VIII: Jesus Speaks to The Women of Jerusalem' which was funded by the novelist Sara Maitland, whose novel 'Daughters of Jerusalem' won the Somerset Maughm Prize. Indeed, in 2009 she published a book entirely based on Chris Gollon's Stations of the Cross (see Latest News page for details).

In 2004, 'Station VI: Jesus Meets His Mother' by Chris Gollon was shown in 'Presence: Images of Christ for the Third Millennium' in St Paul's Cathedral, London, along with Bill Viola's 'Messenger' and works by Maggi Hambling, Craigie Aitchison and Tracey Emin.

We'd like to thank Gallery Techs for their superb work in permanently installing all 14 paintings in the Church.

Use of Arrows by Chris Gollon

Chris Gollon originally started using arrows in his religious works to represent soldiery. He does still use them as symbols for spears and arrows but developed them further as Cupid’s arrows, directional/signpost arrows etc., and also as simple cursors. Chris now also sees arrows as the thorn of suffering in the human condition. In short, they have become multifaceted and can therefore mean different things to different people. They can edit the picture or can disconcert and mislead. They can point the finger, i.e. they can accuse, or more importantly in the religious pictures, they can indicate a chosen one. In the ‘Pre-Penitent Magdalene’ she holds one of the arrows and fully accepts her destiny.

Comments & Press

Fr Alan Green (Anglican priest, Rector of St John on Bethnal Green and Area Dean) with whom Chris Gollon collaborated to produce his Stations of the Cross: "The church of St John on Bethnal Green has had a long-standing involvement with people on the fringes of our society, the sort of people who often figure in Chris' paintings. His work contains many religious allusions and forms, which do not suggest conformity but challenge. These are the themes we wish to explore in this series of the Stations of the Cross and it is vital to have an artist who is not "safe", but perceptive and unsettling in interpreting the traditions. Chris has our confidence on all these counts".

Sister Wendy Beckett (Carmelite nun, BBC TV art critic, quther of 'Beckmann & The Self', published by Pegasus, New York, and other art historical books): "Chris Gollon bears down on the terrible, his approach works, and shocks us into understanding..."

Jackie Wullschlager, Chief Art Critic, Financial Times (published 22nd March 2008 and selected as 'Critic's Choice'):

Chris Gollon & The Church of St John on Bethnal Green, London E2

'Is sacred art possible in a secular age? The question coursed through the 20th century - Chagall and Stanley Spencer, in very different ways, were among the few who answered with conviction - and is yet more fraught with doubt today. So it was a bold, inspired decision of Father Alan Green to commission Chris Gollon to paint 14 "Stations of the Cross" for the beautiful Grade One listed John Soane church on Bethnal Green. Gollon has worked on the paintings since 2000, but the complete series was unveiled for the first time yesterday, on Good Friday.

The contrast between Gollon's absurdist, too-late expressionist style, with its echoes of Bosch, Goya, Beckmann, Grosz, and the neo-classical church will draw attention to both. Discomfort, disjunction, surprise are the point. Gollon's near-cartoonish grotesque villains, glossy, fashion-magazine women, stone-tablet speech bubbles ("Away from Him!", "No!"), and the giant arrows that shoot across his pictures highlighting their emotional centre all give an immediate, vernacular tone to art history's most traditional iconography.

Gollon modelled Jesus on his son, Mary - with mascara running down her cheeks - on his daughter, Nicodemus on Father Alan. Like Spencer, he dramatises the everyday in contemporary images and, depicting our clumsy, ridiculous ordinariness, brings alive for a modern, cynical audience the ghastly dissonance of this story of good and evil, sacrifice and humanity, answering on its own terms a 21st-century culture that regards the heroic as absurd.'

Rachel Campbell-Johnston, art critic, The Times
‘Chris Gollon provides the perfect enticement to visit the Church of St John on Bethnal Green’

A New Spirit in Sacred Art
(2 abridged reviews by Laura Gascoigne in the
international weekly Catholic magazine The Tablet )

‘An admirer of Spanish painting, Gollon is equally influenced by German (…) the malign carnival spirit of Max Beckman is clearly present in the mugging grotesques surrounding Christ in his first Station Jesus is Condemned to Death. While this does not bother the vicar – Green frankly admits to being “uncomfortable with comfortable religious art” – I was curious about the response of his congregation. One parish councillor, Justine, Nigerian-born, was enthusiastic; she sees Gollon’s work as “a success of the imagination. Very conservative people may frown on it, people in their 60s and 70s may think it’s overboard, but it relates to modern secular society”. I asked one boy, 12-year-old Neil, whether he found it funny to see pictures of people pulling faces in church. He shook his head. “No, they’re evil”, he explained, as if it was blindingly obvious. And obvious it is. The standard dynamic between good and evil is precisely what is missing from the standard-issue interpretations we are used to’.

Jesus Meets His Mother: Presence exhibition at St Paul’s Cathedral. ‘No scene in the history of art is more heart-rending, yet art history provides no appropriate model for a modern mother’s grief. Traditional depictions of this scene marginalize Mary. In Raphael’s The Procession to Calvary Jesus passes his mother without a glance, every ounce of his strength devoted to his struggle, while fainting Mary, supported by the Women of Jerusalem, forms a feminine subplot to the action.

This will not do for a modern Mary. Modern women do not faint, and cannot be so conveniently sidelined. In Gollon’s image, for which he used his son and daughter as models, mother and son meet as partners in sacrifice; their heads, raised above their escort of Bosch-like grotesques, are almost level. Even in his Passion Jesus cannot ignore his mother; he turns towards her in filial recognition of her pain. She is the one who turns away, closing her eyes against a sight she cannot bear.
Throughout his series of Stations (…) Gollon has used spearheads to train attention on the figure of Christ. In this Station alone, a single spearhead points at Mary. By this device he acknowledges, with Jesus, that this is Mary’s moment on the way of the Cross.’

Laura Gascoigne is a visual arts writer for Galleries, The Spectator, What’s On, ART Review, Royal Academy Magazine and The Tablet

‘Art pundits who declared in the 1990s that sincerity was as dead as painting reckoned without the 9/11 effect. Sincerity is back up and running, with painting on its heels, and the artist Chris Gollon is out in front. Gollon describes himself as a ‘painter of the absurd’ and his recent Dinner Dates series is reminiscent of Spencer’s caricaturish Beatitudes of Love. But his current project – a series of Stations of the Cross for Sir John Soane’s church of St John, Bethnal Green – is in an older tradition. He shoots from the hip without looking over his shoulder for critical approval and consequently (…) his attention-grabbing compositions, using arrowheads like cursors to direct the focus, will wake parishioners dozing in their pews. And like Titian in his Frari Assumption, he has understood the need for sunbursts of gold to compete with the light streaming through the windows. With their masked grotesques, Gollon’s interpretations owe more to Beckmann, but there is beauty alongside his beasts in his Magdalene, fallen at the foot of the Cross, and his Mater Dolorosa, mascara running, based on his daughter’. What’s On In London Magazine

See also Press page for further reviews

created on 2008-02-07 19:05:49 by iapgoll