Beyond Belief

Beyond Belief: Modern Art and the Religious Imagination was a most challenging and engaging exhibition and showed work by major artists of the modern period.

Beyond Belief explored themes of religion in 20th-century Western art and included works by Denis, Ensor, Kokoschka, Kandinsky, Schmidt-Rotluff, Ernst, Chagall, Beckmann, O’Keefe, Spencer, Dix, Grosz, Newman, Rothko, Motherwell, Saura, Rainer, Beuys, Bellany, McCahon, Kiefer, Boyd, Holzer, Sherman, Bacon, Mapplethorpe, Trockel, Messager, Clemente, Kiki Smith and Flack, as well as an important group of Mexican-based artists, including Orozco, Kahlo, Carrington, Izquierdo, Siqueiros and Varo. In their images, the artists looked to Christianity and Judaism but also, as the title of the exhibition suggested, beyond organised religion to explore the questions of morality, meaning and existence itself.

Works were lent from major international museums and a substantial catalogue, edited by the guest curator of the exhibition, Sister Rosemary Crumlin, incorporated messages by well known figures writing at the intersection of art and theology.