Yan Pei-Ming will showcase a vast painting focused on the Covid-19 pandemic next month. The painting derives its inspiration from the Isenheim altarpiece, a masterpiece of religious art painted between 1512 and 1516 by the German artist Matthias Grünewald.
Titled Pandémie (2020), the painting will be shown at the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar, France, as part of his first retrospective (In the Name of the Father, 2 April-6 September; subject to Covid-19 restrictions). The coronavirus-themed painting, which shows the artist standing over a corpse in a body bag, is a pendant piece in dialogue with the medieval altarpiece housed at the museum.
The 11 painted scenes on the altarpiece were commissioned by an Antonite monastery treating sick peasants and victims of the plague in Isenheim, a village south of Colmar. They include striking images of monsters and devils tormenting Saint Anthony and of Jesus’s tortured, plague-ridden body on the cross, all typical of late-Gothic art in the Rhine Valley. “From its conception, Pandémie was envisioned as a confrontation with the Isenheim Altarpiece, echoing the Crucifixion panels painted by Grünewald,” says a statement.
Explaining the aspects of the painting, Yan Pei-Ming says: “This is our sickness. I give an interpretation of an era I didn’t live through and also of Covid today, an imaginary depiction. It is black, dark, the colour of coal. I am in the painting, in a mask. I am not a doctor nor a carer—what can I do to help combat Covid? There are two cats along with St Peter’s basilica in Rome; cats are often symbolically associated with healing.”
The piece was painted during the second lockdown in France from November to mid-December when a countrywide curfew was introduced. “The viewer might be shocked. It is life today. It might be painful and very hard but today the Covid pandemic has affected everyone, including myself, my family and friends. We can’t see the end—will it be in two years, five years, 20 years? [That] is unthinkable,” adds Yan Pei-Ming.
He also made other works during lockdown including Self-portrait with Mask (2020), which were shown at Thaddaeus Ropac gallery in Salzburg earlier this year.
The forthcoming retrospective in Colmar meanwhile will show around 50 works including a drawing of his grandmother, made when he was 15, and images of his father and mother. “This is the first time that I am presenting these early works alongside paintings [spanning] 35 years,” he says.
The exhibition curator, Frédérique Goerig-Hergott, says in a statement: “The museum’s intention is to raise the veil on Yan Pei-Ming, an essential artist of Chinese origin whose figurative and expressive work, sometimes in the form of polyptychs, presents themes of filiation, sacrifice and the sacred that feature in the Isenheim altarpiece.“