WHAT: “Death: A Self-Portrait”

WHEN: November 15, 2012-February 24, 2013

WHERE: Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London

WHY THIS SHOW MATTERS: “It doesn’t take much to remind me / what a mayfly I am, / what a soap bubble floating over the children’s party,” wrote former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins in “Memento Mori,” the name coming from that enduring Latin axiom for “remember you will die.” Currently, the Wellcome Collection in London is embracing these reminders of our inevitable, carnal end in “Death: A Self-Portrait.”

A culture of death is everywhere, across a wide variety of traditions. Yet it’s rare for a museum to focus so closely on this macabre and unsettling subject. The Wellcome Collection, opened in 2007 by the Wellcome Trust as a “destination for the incurably curious,” is a museum that embraces the overlooked. Sourced from the personal collection of Richard Harris, a Chicago-based former antique print dealer, “Death” has as many skulls as a burial ground in among its 300-odd artifacts and works of contemporary art. Some are carved from wood or molded from metal, like Kiki Smith’s bronze modeled from her own head, while others are engraved or painted, as in Adriaen van Utrecht’s 17th-century “Vanitas: Still life with a bouquet and skull,” in which the vacant sockets of a poor soul’s cranium rest on a closed book among an hourglass, pocket-watch, wilting flowers, and other omens of death. A chandelier of 3,000 plaster bones made by young British artist Jodie Carey looms forebodingly over the space, while a photograph from 1900 shows a group of medical students with their dissected cadaver, the chalkboard behind them scrawled with the words: “When shall we meet again?”

The exhibition is structured to bring viewers into a confrontation with mortality, with art a medium for both denial and acceptance, for both mourning and morbid desire. Etchings by Francisco Goya from the early 1800s depict the brutality of war, and Albrecht Dürer summons the charging horsemen of the apocalypse in a 15th-century woodcut. In contrast, death is a lusty creature in Hans Sebald Beham’s 1543 engraving of a skeleton draped on the Tree of Knowledge next to Adam, gazing at a voluptuous Eve. In an early 20th-century postcard, a young couple kisses farewell, their faces becoming the features of a skull. We are constantly engaged with a danse macabre, and “Death: A Self-Portrait” reflects this personal and universal fate. 

To see works from the exhibition, click here for the slideshow.