Colnaghi presents the exhibition The Decay of Beauty. The Beauty of Decay., curated by Alfred Kren and taking place at Colnaghi London. Spanning millennia, the exhibition explores the tension between beauty and its inevitable decay, and how this has inspired artistic creation for thousands of years. The subject is approached from a variety of periods, cultures, and media, presenting unusual dialogues between works.

Among the earliest works in the exhibition, an Egyptian sarcophagus mask from the Twenty-second Dynasty (c. 942-715 BC) is paired with a nineteenth-century photograph by Émile Brugsch (1842-1930) of a recently excavated mummy, thus dramatically broadening our understanding of Egyptian funerary art while unveiling some of its mysteries.

The classical themes of vanitas and memento mori express the interplay between beauty and decay in European art history, often viewed through the prism of Christian beliefs. A vanitas painting by seventeenth-century Dutch Golden Age painter Jan Vermeulen (1638-1674) speaks directly to Maria Lassnig’s (1919-2004) 2002 work Memento Mori, establishing a link between works centuries apart through a common theme and iconography.

In eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe, artists were constantly looking to the past, at ruins and fragments from Antiquity. The trompe-l’oeil and architectural capricci – both of which incorporate real and imagined ruins into a landscape of the mind – are eloquently represented by an intimate painting by Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761-1845) and a pair of monumental canvases by Hubert Robert (1733-1808).

In Indian mythology the duality of beauty and decay finds its incarnation in Chamunda and Parvati. According to legend, Chamunda appeared from the frown of the benign goddess Parvati to kill demons Chanda and Munda. The terrifying Chamunda, portrayed with skeletal features, is viewed as a form of Parvati, who is herself generally depicted as an idealised female beauty. An Indian tenth-century bust of Chamunda and a late seventeenth to early eighteenth-century Nepalese strut representing a sensuous female figure feature strikingly in The Decay of Beauty. The Beauty of Decay.