Sam Keogh | The Unicorn is Killed and Brought to the Castle Cartoon
In Summer 2023 Primary presented The Unicorn is Killed and Brought to the Castle Cartoon, a solo exhibition by artist Sam Keogh. The installation of large-scale figurative works on paper drew heavily from The Hunt of the Unicorn, a series of seven tapestries made in Flanders at the turn of the 16th century and now housed in The Met Cloisters, New York.
During the exhibition the installation was used by Keogh to stage two performances. These live interventions saw the artist interact with the collaged elements of the work, using them as a visual script, folding and unfolding their surfaces to guide a monologue which will describe and rewrite the history of the original tapestries.
Keogh’s second performance was documented by Freddy Griffiths.
In Keogh’s work, the rarefied world depicted in the tapestries is re-made as a series of cartoons, or 1:1 scale working drawings made to produce a new tapestry. Here, the fantastic scene of the killing of a unicorn is invaded by a cast of monstrous entities. These characters are Frankensteined together with limbs, heads, faces and personal effects from a wide array of sources; some are plucked from pre-modern paintings, others from algorithmically targeted advertising on social media and still more from present day 'fantasy' franchises such as The Lord of the Rings or the Dark Souls video games.
The exhibition was accompanied by a publication with newly commissioned writing by Joseph Buckley, Francis Jones, and Adrian Rifkin. The publication can be downloaded here.
Please contact admin@weareprimary.org if you would like a copy of the publication posting out or to request it in a different format.
