‘You have to face death to feel alive’: Dark fairytales come to life in London exhibition

‘It’s supposed to be an experience that you leave feeling transformed,’ Daniel Malarkey, the curator of ‘Last Night I Dreamt of Manderley’ at London’s Alison Jacques gallery, tells me. It’s a grand ambition for a commercial group exhibition, and not one to be taken lightly.

Given carte blanche over the gallery’s many-roomed Cork Street space, Malarkey has pulled together work by over 30 artists across generations and geographies. The result is a fairytale exhibition that negotiates a complex set of moods and feelings; it is both irreverent and unsettling, containing moments of joy alongside a looming, inky darkness.

It opens with L' escargot / The snail (1996) by the late French sculptor Nicola L, a large metal spiral punctuated with 23 lit candles, which reads as a statement of intent. Its warm glow contrasts with the white overhead lighting and its hypnotic, symbolic form beckons the viewer towards an esoteric, unknown world.

What follows is an ambiguous narrative split into four sections: The Dream, The Grand Staircase, The Underworld and The Ancient Wood. These chapters broadly reflect the spiritual journey of the protagonist in Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 Gothic novel Rebecca, from which the exhibition’s title is also taken.

The story unfolds by way of contemporary and historical works by artists including Dorothea Tanning, Maeve Gilmore, Maggi Hambling and Leonardo Devito. The Dream section features a procession of images and forms suggestive of a wide-eyed, childlike naivety. In the next room, The Grand Staircase, this innocence gives way to a collection of more nuanced and fragmented works. Here, a sense of foreboding begins to set in.

The final room, in the gallery’s black-painted basement, contains just two works: a collection of wooden urns by Eleanor Lakelin titled Lifetime (2024) and an untitled painting by Aleksandra Waliszewska containing a storm of excruciatingly dark scenes and almost-hidden faces. Here, Malarkey, explains, ‘you literally face death’.

It would be difficult to emerge from The Ancient Wood not feeling spooked, but its horror also serves to reanimate the world outside of it. ‘You have to face death to feel alive. The show’s about the hero’s journey,’ says Malarkey. The exhibition comes good on his transformative promise.

Perhaps more impressively, it allows each artist to contribute to its narrative on their own terms. The lines connecting their work are often elusive and never forced. Malarkey traces a near-invisible thread across hundreds of years, subtly steering it towards du Maurier’s fictional estate. The story is one that emerges through what he describes as ‘unconscious connections between images and artists through history’.

‘Last Night I Dreamt of Manderley’ is at London’s Alison Jacques gallery until 8 March 2025

alisonjacques.com

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