After 25 Years: Mat Collishaw, Still Sensational and Appalling

THE GUARDIAN
By Jonathan Jones

"Narcissu" (1990) by Mat Collishaw

UNITED KINGDOM---For me, [Mat] Collishaw is a good political artist for the same reason he is a good religious artist and a good artist-artist. It is because he believes in the efficacy of images. Not for him the abstract evasion, the minimalist half smile – fashionable or not, he wants to punch your imagination in the stomach. He justifies the art of sensation by showing how it can have depth in its oomph.  [link]

Karla Faye Tucker (2010). C-Print, 73 x 60 com (29 x 24 inches) © Mat Collishaw

Collishaw's Last Meal On Death Row series is one of the eerily paradoxical works in which this powerful artist confronts beauty with horror. Other meals in the series are far more restrained. Karla Faye Tucker, who when she died in 1998 was the first woman executed in Texas since 1863, chose a healthy final meal of fruit and salad. Collishaw has pictured it in a sombre light that deliberately recalls paintings by the 17th-century Spanish religious artist and still life master Francisco de Zurbarán. Tucker had converted to Christianity in prison. Collishaw gives his imagined picture of her last meal a spiritual intensity.