Heaven and Hell

Heaven and Hell (2022-23)

Yarden Fudim

Painting of a gloomy and cartoon-like busy city scene with sad cartoon-like figures, a double-decker bus, and a grocery shop under a cloudy sky.

Painting of a cartoonish and cheerful, sunny landscape with happy cartoon-like figures and animals by a river and under a smiling sun.

Two large paintings are hung on a white wall next to each other. The left is a gloomy cartoonish london scene, and the right is a happy sunny landscape with smiling characters in the same style. A tall humanoid-like sculpture is to the right.

^{Listen to an audio description of this work}

Referencing the tradition of paintings of biblical stories – heaven and hell, the last judgement, or the garden of earthly delights – Yarden’s diptych depicts a bustling city, similar to London, in which anonymous figures all pass by on undisclosed journeys. In Hell, the figures appear with pound symbols above their generally unhappy faces – money is on the mind.

In contrast, Heaven paints a happy picture of figures young and old, nude and in a wild landscape, this time with hearts above their heads and smiles on their faces: a care-free, utopian paradise.

The work confronts the time and work pressures of crowded, urban environments that often have the compound effect of our removal from nature, a feeling of being trapped amidst the inorganic and tied inescapably to the technology required to be productive, earning citizens. At the same time, Yarden’s depiction of Heaven, in its brightly coloured, glossy perfection also evokes its own kind of unease and invites us to consider how authentic our imagined ‘greener pastures’ might actually be.

^{Listen to this text}

Back to the exhibition