MYTH AND Mystery

Grand and epic themes of antiquity are given new life and meaning in the powerful paintings of Angela Gram.

- MICHAEL PEARCE

Three Birds, 2024, oil on panel, 16 x 16"

In Angela Gram's visions, mutation distorts the limits of conventional ecological stability, and unusual new orientations challenge the old order, birthing hybrid creatures with strange shapes and stories, emerging in discomfort as alien and unfamiliar forms. Nature is awry. "As a society we impose our own narrative onto what animals are, and it's really distorted and strange," she says, so she cuts a unique path through mysteries and monsters, painting genetically-altered animals entangled with wrecked war machines. She paints images mirroring the conflict between technology and nature, creating modern mutations seemingly inspired by the threats of uncontrolled DNA manipulation and sci-fi fantasies about nuclear disasters. But in her art, the living fusions of the future meet the creatures of medieval mythology and classical metamorphoses, which are equally as weird as the frightening and beautiful progeny of the lab.