What is religious art? Some examples

Take a stroll through just about any gallery dealing with the work of living, western, artists, and you'll be most unlikely to discover anything that would want to describe itself as 'religious'.
There's a profound contemporary prejudice against such art, perhaps a mistrust of the motives of those making it. Some artists may use religious imagery and symbol, but generally they do it in subversive ways, as a critique of religious institutions, even of people's claim to religious experience.

I'm thinking here of Andreas Serrano's notorious piece called 'Piss Christ', where a tacky plastic crucifix has been submerged in urine. Or there's Francis Bacon's 'Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion'. Although painted nearly 60 years ago, so not strictly contemporary, it clearly shows Bacon's belief that the crucifixion was just another meaningless human outrage, staring in the face of the recently exposed Holocaust. But for me it is also a profound existential reading of the human condition, and of our ability to crucify what is good.

But even if the culture is against historical forms of religion, and in particular institutional forms, there is a hunger abroad for ways to engage with something beyond the concrete and conscious.
At its broadest, there's a desire for transcendence, for spiritual experience. Just look at the attendance figures for 'Seeing Salvation', the National Gallery's most successful show for decades. An incredible 84,000 of the 350,000 visitors came through their doors for the first time. And they were, of course, coming to see artwork specifically dealing with the life and person of Christ.

Neil MacGregor, Director at the National Gallery, remarked further on this phenomenon recently. He said that when he was first appointed, he noticed how many visitors came to the Gallery in search of the opportunity to pray or meditate, before some of its great cultural icons.

Honthorst's 'Christ before the High Priest' drew particularly high numbers. At its heart, this image offers the universal symbol of light as revelation and purity, here bringing light to bear on the face of Christ, God incarnate in the world, revealing the encounter between good and evil, as represented by those seeking to put him to death.

This type of Christian religious art draws on a specific language, that of a clear narrative taken from Christian scripture. It remains valid for our time, as well as being a 'child of its own time' (Kandinsky), because we can still see it through the eyes of history. We take our place at the end of a long line of other viewers, who've all responded and claimed it for themselves as an image that seeks to draw us beyond ourselves.

However, in recent decades in the West, we have reached a point where such traditional religious visual language no longer has currency amongst artists. Our own culture, and those who represent it, needs a fresh vision of what it is possible to say 'from faith for faith'.

Traditional forms of religious art haven't been dispensed with entirely. We have artists such as Dinah Roe Kendall, for example her 'Presentation in the Temple'. Her work contemporises Gospel scenes as dynamic, approachable and living narrative. Mark Cazalet and Roger Wagner's work also draw on biblical stories. Other artists freely exploring Christian themes in their work include Nicholas Mynheer, Elizabeth Grey-King, Rupert Loydell, Paul Hobbs and Jean Lamb.

Art of other religions has not been so affected by Western culture. Islamic geometry is a cross-cultural universal language, creating patterns and forms expressing beauty and order without using any figurative elements, but having tremendous emotive power.

But in general, western artists are deconstructing the narrative of religious art, dealing instead with what they would prefer to describe as 'spiritual' work. Postmodernism validates an increasingly wide range of artistic mediums, from painting and sculpture through to performance art, video and installation work.

Pressure of time means that I have to limit my discussion to two-dimensional art, since that's the format with which I am most familiar.

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