Artists Remake the Tarot
An iconic exhibition . . .
In 2011, the UK’s Focal Point gallery put together an exhibition titled “Outrageous Fortune: Artists Remake the Tarot.” And curator Andrew Hunt’s idea for organizing the show was as complex as a Tarot reading.
Each artist from a selected group was asked to recruit five more artists—creating a randomized group with unpredictable connections. Each of the resulting 78 participants was assigned a Tarot card, based purely on chance, and was asked to create a work inspired by the card.
Artists were free to use any medium, but almost all submitted paintings. Works were required to measure 428 x 285 mm (roughly 11 x 17 in).
The show itself was arranged in three gallery rooms, and in each room there was a posted list of the Tarot cards for that room, in their traditional order. The art works were displayed in the same order—so visitors had to match the card on the list to the art on the wall.
Echoes (often distant) of essential Tarot ideas and iconography were the only common denominator of the show’s artworks, which range from minimalist graphic prints to complex collages to manipulated photographs. Some of them bear an obvious—even super-obvious—relation to the assigned Tarot card, while others could not possibly be matched to the assigned image without following the map.
But all of them are fascinating, in the sense that they represent how artists unfamiliar with the Tarot take a limited amount of information about a single card, and create in their own style a small work intended to reflect that card.
There’s no coherent album of the show online—and the booklet that evidently went with it seems oddly mixed up, at least in the version I saw. The artworks were reproduced in a conventional deck format, with the 1000 numbered copies distributed by seemingly random means. And if there’s one of them still to be had somewhere, I couldn’t find it.
But! I’ve matched up a few of the artworks with their assigned cards, so you can get a small idea of the show’s diversity.
“The Hanged Man” by Dawn Mellor
“Death” by Simon Popper
“Nine of Swords” by Mike Nelson
“King of Wands” by Dan Rees
“Two of Pentacles” by Adam Chodzko
“Ace of Chalices” by Anna Barriball
“Five of Swords” by Ruth Ewan
So that’s a very brief virtual tour of the show, which traveled to several different galleries and caught attention among UK art-lovers. Some of the artists contributing to the show were very well-known—including Suzanne Treister, whose Hexen 2.0 project is described at more length in this story.