The Mother Of All Virgins

Damien Hirst (b. 1965) - Virgin Mother (10.7 metres), 2006


'What I really like is minimum effort for maximum effect.'

Damien Hirst

Déjà Lu

Gregory Crewdson (b. 1962) - Untitled (from the series 'Twilight'), 2001


'Literature is the question minus the answer.'

Roland Barthes

The Doyens Of Damnation

Hieronymous Bosch (c. 1450-1516) - The Temptation of St. Anthony (central panel), 1500


'Saintliness is also a temptation.'

Jean Anouilh

Sex Is Not The Enemy

Tom Wesselmann (1931-2004) - Great American Nude, #92, 1967


'I don't know the question, but sex is definitely the answer.'

Woody Allen

The Heart Is A Lonely Punter

Caspar David Friedrich (1770-1840) - Man and Woman Contemplate the Moon, c. 1824


'We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone.'

Orson Welles

Twinkle, Twinkle

Tony Oursler (b. 1957) - Star, 2005


'I wish that I was where I am.'

Gertrude Stein

Darkness Visible

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) - Olive Trees in the Sun, 1889


'I became insane. With long intervals of horrible sanity.'

Edgar Allan Poe

The Genius Of Infirmity

Max Klinger (1857-1920) - Plague, 1898


'I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worthwhile.'

George Bernard Shaw

Lux Aeterna

Robert Longo (b. 1953) - Untitled (Hot Sun), 2006


'When you possess light within, you see it externally.'

Anaïs Nin

The Contours Of Cognition

Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) - The Singer Yvette Guilbert, 1894


'Drawing is putting a line around an idea.'

Henri Matisse

Love's Antidote Is You

Cindy Sherman (b. 1954) - Untitled #305, 1994


'Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.'

Sigmund Freud

At The Crossroads Of Art And Philosophy

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) - A Walk at Dusk, c. 1830-35


'We have art in order not to die of truth.'

Friedrich Nietzsche

'The philosopher creates, he doesn't reflect.'

Gilles Deleuze

'Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves. For all external sources of happiness and pleasure are, by their very nature, highly uncertain, precarious, ephemeral and subject to chance. '

Arthur Schopenhauer

Madness Became Him

Salvador Dalí (1904-1989)


'Originality is nothing but judicious imitation.'

Voltaire

'It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.'

Herman Melville

'Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.'

Salvador Dalí

The Bitterness Of Sweet Memories

Édouard Manet (1832-1883) - The Lemon, 1880


'There is no greater sorrow than to recall in misery the time when we were happy.'

Dante Alighieri

Everybody Knows The Square Of Zero

Jenny Holzer (b. 1950) - The Survival Series: The Conversation Always Turns To Living Long Enough To Have Fun, 1983-5


'I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and long words bother me.'

Winnie the Pooh

The Gift Of Banishment

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarotti Simoni (1475-1564) - The Fall and The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, 1509-10


'The only paradise is paradise lost.'

Marcel Proust

Industrial Light Sans Magic

Dan Flavin (1933-1996) - greens crossing greens (to Piet Mondrian who lacked green), 1966


'I like my use of light to be openly situational in the sense that there is no invitation to meditate, to contemplate.'

'My icons do not raise up the blessed saviour in elaborate cathedrals. They are constructed concentrations celebrating barren rooms. They bring a limited light.'

'One might not think of light as matter of fact, but I do. And it is, as I said, as plain and open and direct an art as you will ever find.'

Dan Flavin

A Freudian Photo Finish

Man Ray (1890-1976) - La Marquise Casati, 1922


'The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.'

Walter Benjamin

I See Red

Henri Matisse (1869-1954) - The Red Studio, 1911


'Mere colour, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.'

Oscar Wilde

The Icy Maze

Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) - Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue, 1921


'Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.'

Theodor Adorno