David Tibet: Hallucinate, Children

Wird ins Deutsche übersetzt…

David Tibet, founder of the musical project Current 93, is one of the most distinctive figures of the esoteric and experimental underground of recent decades. Across an extensive discography comprising dozens of albums, he has created a singular body of work shaped through collaborations with figures such as Steven Stapleton, Michael Cashmore, Nick Cave, Shirley Collins, and Anohni, among many others. The exhibition Hallucinate, Children is being developed in collaboration with the artist and will present visual works spanning the full arc of Tibet’s career. It will introduce his artistic practice as an autonomous visual universe, closely interwoven with his music, writings, publishing activities, and long-standing engagement with visionary literature, Biblical and apocryphal texts, and marginal currents of spiritual imagination. Tibet’s drawings and paintings are not illustrations of songs, nor ancillary material to a musical career. Rather, they function as independent records of dream, revelation, disquiet, and ecstatic image-making. Their symbolic language is populated by recurring figures and signs: children, stars, birds, animals, angels, sacred names, apparitions, and apocalyptic landscapes. Together, these motifs form a world poised between innocence and terror, fragility and prophecy, nursery rhyme, and Last Judgment. Tibet’s work emerges from a broad tradition of visionary art and literature: from John Milton, William Blake, MR James, Count Stenbock, and Thomas Ligotti to the British hallucinatory underground, Christian apocalypticism, and obscure supernatural writings. Hallucinate, Children invites viewers into a space in which the image is not decoration, but a sign: an urgent, unsettling, and strangely tender testimony to a world perpetually on the threshold of revelation. Curator: Otto M. Urban