Chris Gollon: Stations of the Cross
Title: Stations of the Cross
Artist: Chris Gollon (1953–2017, British)
Location: St John on Bethnal Green (C of E)
Date: 2000–9
In 2000, the artist Chris Gollon was commissioned to paint fourteen Stations of the Cross for the Church of St John on Bethnal Green, a Grade I listed building designed by Sir John Soane. This was one of the largest commissions by the Church of England in recent times. Although previously Gollon was not best known for his religious work, the Rector Alan Green, who commissioned the work, justified the commission on the grounds that ‘the church of St John on Bethnal Green has had a long-standing involvement with people on the fringes of our society, the sort of people who often figure in Chris’ paintings. His work contains many religious allusions and forms, which do not suggest conformity but challenge. These are the themes we wish to explore in this series of the Stations of the Cross and it is vital to have an artist who is not “safe” but perceptive and unsettling in interpreting the traditions. Chris has our confidence on all these counts.’
The paintings were permanently installed in March 2009. The art critic Jackie Wullschläger suggests that, ‘like Spencer, he dramatises the everyday in contemporary images and, depicting our clumsy, ridiculous ordinariness, brings alive for a modern, cynical audience the ghastly dissonance of this story of good and evil, sacrifice and humanity, answering on its own terms a 21st-century culture that regards the heroic as absurd.’ The writer Sara Maitland has written a book of reflections on Gollon’s Stations.
Chris Gollon (1953–2017) was a critically acclaimed, self-taught, British painter whose work often drew on his friendships and collaborations with musicians. In the 1990s he exhibited at Art Chicago (1997) and Root (1998) together with Yoko Ono, David Bowie and Gavin Turk. In 2009, Gollon accepted a three-month fellowship and residency at the Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University, and he was an artist-in-residence at St Mary’s College, Durham, in 2011. His solo exhibition, Incarnation, Mary and Women from the Bible was exhibited at Guildford Cathedral in 2014 and went on to tour several other English cathedrals. After his death in 2017, a private collector donated three further paintings by Gollon to St John on Bethnal Green.
Further information
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Size: between 92 and 183 cm high.
Permanent display
See Chris Gollon’s Stations of the Cross on the Ecclesiart map here.
Commisioner: Rector Alan Green, The Church of St John on Bethnal Green