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Inferno


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Image of Inferno

Inferno
Painting

2003
66 x 120 in. (167.64 x 304.8 cm)

Sandow Birk (Detroit, Michigan, 1962 - ) Primary

Object Type: Painting
Medium and Support: Oil and acrylic on canvas
Credit Line: Gift of the Lipman Family Foundation, in honor of the San Jose Museum of Art's 35th anniversary.
Accession Number: 2003.11

SJMA Label Text


Indestructible Wonder (2017)

Sandow Birk uses the drama and narrative pull of realism in his clever updates of historical masterpieces. Over the course of five years, Birk produced an epic series of paintings and illustrations based on Dante Alighieri’s literary masterpiece The Divine Comedy (1308 – 21). This epic poem recounts Dante’s imagined journey through hell, purgatory, and heaven and offers a medieval perspective on sin, piety, and the gradual revelation of God.

In Inferno (Birk’s vision of hell), the West and East coasts implausibly collide. Remains of the Golden Gate Bridge stand over a burned-out canyon rimmed with Los Angeles’s ubiquitous traffic jams and billboards; the ruins of New York’s World Trade Center smolder in the foreground. Birk modeled his painting in part on Frederic Edwin Church’s volcanic landscape Cotopaxi (1862). Like Church, who painted his threatening landscape in response to the ravaging American Civil War, Birk depicted an apocalyptic vision of the nation should rampant urbanization and globalization remain unchecked.


To Hell and Back: Sandow Birk’s Divine Comedy (2012)

Sandow Birk envisions the Inferno as a desecrated landscape cluttered with the ruins of America’s greatest icons. His satirical rendering is modeled in part after Frederic Edwin Church’s 1862 volcanic landscape, Cotopaxi. In Birk’s version the West and East coasts implausibly collide. Remains of the Golden Gate Bridge stand over a yawning burned-out canyon, rimmed with L.A.’s ubiquitous traffic jams and billboards, while the ruins of the World Trade Center smolder in the foreground. Perched on the ruins of a freeway overpass, Virgil and Dante contemplate the devastation. Dante, who is dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, bears a striking resemblance to Birk.


Real and HyperReal (2010)

In Inferno, Sandow Birk interpreted the second of the three parts of Dante’s The Divine Comedy 1308 – 21. Birk depicted purgatory—where souls go to absolve their sins before advancing to heaven—as an updated version of the Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Tower of Babel, 1563. The biblical story of Babel tells of humanity’s absurd efforts to build a tower to heaven. In Birk’s version of the story, humorously restaged in San Francisco, a volcanic mountain becomes a whirl of activity featuring an endless spiral of freeway systems and urban chaos.

Exhibition

Dante and Artistic Translation, September 11 – December 19, 2021, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.

Indestructible Wonder, April 18, 2016 - January 29, 2017, Second Floor, Central and North Galleries, San José Museum of Art.

To Hell and Back: Sandow Birk’s Divine Comedy, February 18, 2012 - September 16, 2012, Historic Wing, Paul L. Davies Gallery, San José Museum of Art.

Real and HyperReal, January 30, 2010 - August 1, 2010, New Wing, First Floor, Gibson Family and Plaza Galleries, San José Museum of Art.

It's About Time: Celebrating 35 Years, October 3, 2004 - February 13, 2005, New Wing, Gibson Family Gallery and Plaza Gallery, First Floor, San José Museum of Art.

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Exhibition List
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Dimensions
  • Image Dimensions: 66 x 120 in. (167.64 x 304.8 cm)

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