Memento Mori and the Dance of Light at Lévy Gorvy Dayan
As autumn darkens into All Hallows' Eve, three visionary artists confront mortality and transcendence through the lens of the skull. At the gallery's Mayfair address, spectral meditations on death, innocence and the eternal mysteries unfold.
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The skull has haunted Western imagination for centuries, that most democratic of symbols speaking equally to peasant and prince of the finite nature of human existence. Yet in the hands of three consummate artists, this memento mori transforms into something far more layered than mere vanitas: it becomes a portal through which innocence, folklore and the boundless mystery of love itself pour forth.
Cecily Brown’s untitled work from 2005 presents perhaps the most ingenious interrogation of this ancient theme. Here, the expected grimace of mortality dissolves into optical play, the skull’s central form recasting itself as two childlike figures. It is a moment of profound generosity, this transformation, where the artist counters death’s dominion with the radiance of youth. The viewer’s eye becomes complicit in the artist’s gentle sleight of hand, discovering innocence where darkness ought to dwell.
Where Brown traffics in optical reverie, Alison Watt’s “Hircus” (2024) invokes a darker, more arcane lineage. The skull depicted here belongs to a goat, that creature forever entwined with the folklore of witchcraft and nocturnal revels. Yet Watt’s practice, devoted to the quiet contemplation of still life, transforms this potentially sinister imagery into something altogether more meditative. The work exemplifies her sustained inquiry into form, silence and the profound melancholy that can inhabit a single object when regarded with sufficient tenderness and attention.
Tracey Emin’s “We Fell from the Sky” (2022) completes this triptych of mortality and transcendence with a composition steeped in shadow and sorrow. The darkness drawing the artist’s palette derives from Francisco Goya, that master of the grotesque and the sublime. Yet within this shadowed world, Emin meditates on the strange alchemy by which love and death become not opposites but intimate companions, bound together in ways that defy rational untangling. It is a work that speaks to the heart’s paradoxes, to the ways in which our deepest attachments remain forever shadowed by the knowledge of loss.
Through November 2026, these works remain on view at 35 Dover Street in Mayfair, inviting contemplation of themes that art has long grappled with, yet which never lose their power to move and unsettled us. This is the gallery at its truest purpose: a space where beauty and mortality meet without apology, where the viewer leaves transformed by the encounter.
Imagery courtesy of Lévy Gorvy Dayan (@levygorvydayan).
