Pablo Bronstein: Hell in its Heyday

In a new body of work created especially for Sir John Soane’s Museum, contemporary artist Pablo Bronstein presents his unique, seductive and deeply ironic vision of hell.

Created especially for Sir John Soane’s Museum, a series of large-scale watercolours will take visitors on a tour of hell in a nostalgic and ironic representation of the last two centuries of progress. Imagined as a monumental city, visitors will be guided through concert halls, casinos, botanical gardens, car factories and oil rigs. A new film, featuring a group of diabolical antique dealers performing a masked ballet will also be shown.

Spanning drawing, film, watercolour, choreography and performance, Pablo Bronstein’s work explores themes of consumerism, Queer identity, and, prominently, architecture. In the exhibition, the first major museum show since 2009 to focus on Bronstein’s works on paper, visitors will see the accumulation of ornament, fragments and borrowed images in the Soane Museum echoed in the new works.