Blood on a white wall: art gallery trauma

Trauma is at GV Art in Marylebone until February 18

Alzheimer’s is so terrifying a disease that I’m scared that thinking about it will set off a chain reaction in my brain and I’ll develop the condition. I know that’s ridiculous. I know that’s not how the brain works. And yet my fear of the trauma unique to Alzheimer’s undercuts my rationalism.

Right now in London, there’s a place I can go to think and talk about Alzheimer’s and its more abstract attacks on humanity – not just the way it erodes brain tissue, but what this does to our very souls.

The GV Art gallery in Marylebone is hosting a special discussion on Art and Alzheimer’s, this Thursday, 26 January, at 7pm. Art historian Patricia Utermolhen and artist Shelley James will speak about the connections between art and Alzheimer’s, while two doctors will talk about the science. The evening is connected to GV Art’s ongoing exhibition, Trauma, and marks a significant event on the Alchemy calendar.

Trauma is a provocative collection of artistic works that forces the visitor to consider and try to understand the various manifestations of trauma. As curators Dr Jonathan Hutt and Bojana Popovic say, “Trauma remains stigmatised and something from which we avert our gaze. Is this driven by a simple fear that to verbalise trauma is to perpetuate its existence? Or is it a more visceral reaction to our own fragility and mortality?”

One of the most moving pieces is that of artist William Utermohlen, who died from the consequences of Alzheimer’s in 2007. Utermohlen’s contributions to Trauma are the drawings he made in the final stages of his disease as he confronts the very thing that is killing him. The sketches of a head with few features but an over-sized ear – and a coffee stain – are so evocative of the fear we all have of losing our minds. It is Utermohlen’s wife Patricia who will talk this Thursday evening.

Another work in the exhibition is that of Dr Steven Gentleman, a specialist in neuropathology at Imperial College London. Rather cunningly, Gentleman has smuggled in to the gallery something that most of us would not consider art in its usual context. Rarely does a gallery ask its visitors to look down microscopes, but to see Gentleman’s contribution, you must press your eyes against the viewfinders. There you see slides of brain tissue responding to contusions. “Examined through the lens of an electron microscope, the body’s complexity, frailty and artistry are laid bare,” say the curators. As Gentleman himself notes: “Because of my work and pace of life, art rarely consciously plays a role in what I do, but when I look through a lens what I see is beautiful. I want to share that so other people can see what I see.”

The exhibition looks much further than the brain, though. The most stunning and memorable pieces are the glass sculptures of viruses made by Luke Jerram. Working in collaboration with glassblowers and virologists, Jerram has created an extraordinary series of sculptures that force you to reconsider viruses. Magnified over a million times, they are both menacing and beautiful, spiky and playful, familiar and alien.

These organisms are usually invisible to us, but their effects are all too obvious. That notion in itself is explored in Rachel Gadsden’s Ubuntu painting, which explores an energy and hope not usually associated with HIV/Aids. Gadsden’s work will be the subject of a second evening discussion hosted by GV Art, on Wednesday 1 February at 6pm.

The discussions are free, but you must email the gallery to reserve a place on info@gvart.co.uk.

Trauma itself runs until 18 February.