Sunday blues… This painting by New York artist Bambou Gili formed part of the group exhibition, This Sacred Vessel (Part II), held at Arsenal Contemporary Art in 2020. The show’s aim was to explore the “history of figurative painting, and to examine the new ways in which we might navigate the relationship between our own body and others,” wrote Emily Gosling in her feature on the subject. “[This] piece takes the iconic painting [of Ophelia] by Sir John Everett Millais, which carries tragic and poignant overtones in its implications of imminent death, and places it into a firmly domestic setting. In doing so, the painting both minimises the more tragic overtones of the original Ophelia and adds a new eeriness.”
