5 Contemporary Artists Inspired by Baroque

Baroque, the style that originated in the sixteenth century during the time of political and religious turmoil in Europe, is famous for its emotional intensity, contrasting light and shadow, and excessive decoration. As a dramatic and manipulative form of art, Baroque is based on empathy. In the image-saturated, overwhelmingly loud contemporary culture that fights for our attention, the principles of Baroque art, when applied correctly, can still be potent enough to distract and absorb us. Read on to get familiar with contemporary artists reinventing the style of the Baroque period.

The Baroque era was a time of great political and religious tension. The overtly excessive, glorious, and uncompromising art form developed from the need for effective religious propaganda of a new kind. By the 16th century the demonstrative wealth and spiritual monopoly of the Catholic Church became overwhelming and suffocating. The Protestant Reformation

movement demanded that the Church give up its power as the necessary intermediary between God and laypeople. Protestants also wanted the Church to denounce its material possessions accumulated over centuries. The public support for the new religious movement was immense, especially in Northern Europe.

To maintain the grasp of their followers without compromising the clergy’s well-being, the Vatican had to act quickly. Instead of rebuffing the Protestant accusations, they chose to double down on them. The huge and intricate Baroque artworks and buildings brought the Church’s display of wealth to an astonishing extreme. To combat the sober rationality of the Protestant ideology, Catholic artists emphasized the emotional component of their creations. Baroque art manipulated human compassion, provoking churchgoers to empathize with suffering martyrs and saints experiencing spiritual revelations. The gilded frames and abundant decorations created a unique and powerful aesthetic experience, strengthening feelings of devotion and reverence.

During the era of modern art, the Baroque style temporarily fell out of favor because of its manipulative opulence and lack of intellectual basis. By the 1960s, however, Baroque became fixed in the canonic history of art as the unique movement that left an enormous impact on Western art. Since then, modern and contemporary artists have often referenced the Baroque era in their works. The demonstrative excess in times of volatility feels tempting even today. There are always attempts to shift the focus from the objective imbalance of powers to the emotional rollercoaster of dramatic expression. Contemporary artists often subvert the politics of Baroque by exploring the notions of race, gender, and power dynamics within its elitist and specific visual language.

Contemporary artist Janine Antoni famously intertwines multiple layers of meaning and interpretations in her works, exploring tactile, emotional, and conceptual planes of expression. In her 2019 work titled I Am Fertile Ground Janine Antoni uses the traditional structure of a gilded Christian altarpiece consisting of three elements. However, instead of placing a male figure of Jesus in the center according to tradition, she leaves the space seemingly empty. The place of the human figure is occupied by a plot of land—the earth, the mother, the fertile ground in its pre-Christian sense. Her triptych is a celebration of femininity formulated through the patriarchal language of Christian art.

Despite the spiritual exhalation of its subject matter, Baroque art was always inherently physiological and tied to bodily sensations. Baroque saints suffered through gruesome scenes of torture like Saint Bartholomew who was flayed alive. Others experienced intense, almost sexualized revelations like Saint Theresa who was portrayed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. In contrast to this, Antoni removes the physical body from the scene, instead showing it in the form of an all-encompassing eternal archetype, the land giving birth to all living things, the endless mechanism of life, death, and rebirth. Moreover, the image is painted from the first-person perspective instead of the traditional third-person look present in religious art.

2. Tara Sellios: Baroque Still Life on Camera

Contemporary American photographer Tara Sellios reimagines the concept of Baroque-era still life. Apart from dramatic religious scenes and overwhelming illusionary spaces, Baroque art developed the tradition of depicting inanimate objects, food, and table arrangements in a similar sensory-saturated manner. The hyper-realistic compositions of ripe fruit, often on the verge of rotting, slaughtered game, and freshly cut loaves of bread were both attractive and grotesque. They were reflections upon human mortality, signals of one’s social status, and thoroughly arranged symbolic messages of Christian values and norms.

Tara Sellios dwells upon the most macabre and unsettling aspect of Baroque still life painting—the inherent presence of death and decay. To find its way into the still-life composition, a flower must be cut down, a fish removed from the water, and a bird trapped or shot by a hunter. Sellios captures overripe fruits and rotting sea creatures among messy draperies of wine-stained tablecloths, overturned goblets, bones, and discarded body parts. Both repulsive and alluring, these dark images challenge the viewer’s perception by offering a confusing sensory mix of form and content. The chaos on them is carefully orchestrated and rehearsed by the photographer behind the scenes. While preparing her compositions, Sellios usually paints or draws them at first, bringing her works even closer to the Baroque tradition of image creation.

Korean artist Lee Bul reconstructs Baroque grandeur from cheap accessible materials and turns it into futuristic fantasies, reminiscent of movie decorations. She blends organic and artificial materials in the most unexpected ways. Lee Bul borrows not only from Baroque but various art movements throughout the entire history of art—from Piranesi’s nauseating labyrinths to Italian Futurism.

However, the Baroque juxtaposition of beautiful and repulsive repeats throughout many of her works. In one of her most famous works, Majestic Splendor, Lee decorated dead fish with beads and crystals. Although visually impressive, the installation soon started to spread a foul odor, with the artist desperately trying to cover it with chemicals. Another of her projects relating to the darker side of Baroque lavishness was a copy of a monumental crystal and pearl chandelier, made from cheap plastic beads. Instead of the revered original, Lee created a cheap copy that only from afar could fool the viewer. Unlike the authentic piece, it is accessible yet disappointing, never quite reaching the expressive potential it reached. Her Baroque-inspired works are always tactile, inviting sensory perception. However, they also always hide something unusual and repulsive behind them. For example, cheap plastic, rotten fish, or intertwined tentacles forming an intricate sculpture.

4.  Audrey Flack’s Post-Pop Baroque

The famous photorealist artist and the last Abstract Expressionist standing, Audrey Flack still remains active and prolific, even in her nineties. From the 1970s, she moved from her abstract basis towards its complete opposite—hyper-realist still lifes inspired by the Baroque-era Vanitas paintings. These compositions were coded expressions of the futility of earthly pleasures, urging their audiences to prioritize the spiritual over the physical. Audrey Flack’s works, created using photographs projected on canvas, applied the same formula, replacing archaic objects with contemporary ones, like printed photographs, branded perfume bottles, and jewelry.

In recent years, Audrey Flack developed her relationship with Baroque art even further. A self-proclaimed Radical Old Mistress (a feminist twist on the Old Master title), Flack created compositions copied straight from paintings of Peter Paul Rubens. However, she repainted them in a Pop Art style, with comic book characters next to silhouettes in period dresses.

One of the things uniting Baroque with more modern forms and styles of art was its dynamic fluidity. The lines forming signature Baroque draperies often rhyme with those of biomorphic abstraction found in the works of sculptors like Jean Arp. Moreover, Baroque presented itself as a total work of art that created space, which was essentially all-encompassing and overwhelming.

The works of American sculptor Sarah Sze demonstrate similar qualities and ambition. Although her objects are crafted from plastic containers, tape, strings, and all sorts of everyday materials instead of gold and marble, their installations are similarly complex and absorbing. The space they create does not let the viewer go easily, urging them to examine it from all angles. In Baroque architecture, light was an equally important material, considered and constructed from the earliest stages of project development. Sarah Sze crafts light around her works as meticulously as the works themselves, adjusting them for every show depending on location, time, and space available.