The title ‘The future has an ancient heart’ is a quote by Carlo Levi – an Italian painter, writer, activist, anti-fascist and doctor (1902-1975). This painting is from a series based on trees from art history – the composition of each one is built from the repetition of a silkscreen image of a tree by Durer, Hokusai, Cezanne, Mondrian or Magritte. This painting is built with the layering of multiple silkscreened images of Albrecht Durer’s ‘Hercules At The Crossroads’ (1498), which Anne-Marie painted and drew into over and over again and again until the source image broke down and became a literal abstraction of the original. Anne-Marie is interested in exploring what it might mean for her as a female artist to take imagery from the long, pale. male history of art, strip it for parts and then build something new.
‘At The Crossroads’ is a series of letterpress prints, each uniquely hand-coloured in watercolour. The imagery is based on Albrecht Durer’s ‘Hercules At The Crossroads’ (1498), with a nod to Andy Warhol’s ‘Do it yourself’ series of paintings by numbers (1962). The unique colour scheme for each print is shown in a key in the bottom right hand corner.
Anne-Marie James (b.1981) was born in Buckinghamshire, UK and currently lives and works in Suffolk. James’s residencies include The British School at Rome, Italy (2013), Headspace, Nara, Japan (2011) and Lantana Project, Memphis, Tennessee, USA (2006). Public collections The British Museum, London; The British School at Rome, Rome; Victoria and Albert Museum, London.