Catalogue: From Death to Death and Other Small Tales

From Death to Death and Other Small Tales at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art brings together works from the Edinburgh gallery’s permanent collection with pieces from the extraordinary private holdings of the D Daskalopoulos Collection.

The exhibition (until 8 September) looks at how the idea of the body has been interrogated by artists to reveal the nature of the human condition.

A central concept of the show is the enabling of a conversation between the two collections, to explore how a dialogue between very different works of art might animate each work in new ways.

Juxtapositions

The accompanying catalogue is not only intended to contextualise the themes explored in the exhibition, but also to provide a record of what our visitors experience as they walk through the gallery.

The illustrations trace the juxtapositions presented in the show through in-situ photography and single plates, and are laid out in the same order in which works are installed throughout the building.

The plan was always to publish the catalogue in March, after the exhibition had opened in December last year. This was to ensure that exhibition photography could be included.

As a free show with a nine-month run, this has also provided an opportunity to renew interest in the show, locally and elsewhere.

Momento mori

Given the diversity of the 120 works featured, choosing a cover image for the catalogue to represent the exhibition as a whole was potentially challenging.

However, Robert Gober’s Untitled dramatically articulates many of the strands that run throughout the exhibition – the dialectic between male and female, questions of identity, the uncanny, and artists’ visceral uses of materials – to name but a few.

In the show, Gober’s sculpture is paired with René Magritte’s The Bungler, which features a vanitas or memento mori.

This latter work is on the back cover, an acknowledgment that the idea of death lies at the heart of so much of what it means to be alive.

Lucy Askew is a senior curator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh