Del Toro horror art on display
MINNEAPOLIS — It’s extraordinary when one of the most talented, original and acclaimed filmmakers of his time moves from the artificial canvas of theater screens to traditional museum exhibits. But who expects the ordinary from Guillermo del Toro?
In artfully designed, genre-defying fantasies such as Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth and Crimson Peak, the Mexican-born director/writer/ producer transports audiences to brutal and bewitching territory.
Now he is moving to the art gallery with “Guillermo del Toro: At Home With Monsters,” at the Minneapolis Institute of Art through May 28.
An elaborate haunted-house display showcases his private treasury of memorabilia from fantasy and science fiction films. The exhibit is presented in atmospheric spaces inspired by Del Toro’s Bleak House, a sprawling Los Angeles mansion he transformed into an Edwardian house of horrors to contain his vast holdings.
The displays include gothic paintings, sculptures of ogres lifesize and larger, Del Toro’s sketchbooks, unsettling costumes, beastly photographs and preproduction scale models of characters that are iconoclastic works of art in their own right.
His body of work, ranging from film to novels and children’s animated TV, appeals to scholars and fanboys alike. Juli Kroll, an associate professor of world cinema, Latin American culture and Spanish at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, calls Del Toro “an alchemist” of dreamlike narratives, akin to iconic surrealist director Luis Bunuel.
Gabriel Ritter, curator of contemporary art, said the idea came to the institute’s director, Kaywin Feldman, as she read a New Yorker profile of Del Toro and was intrigued by his connection to the foreboding art of Goya and Hieronymus Bosch.
That was six years ago. In the meantime, the institute worked on the exhibit with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.
The show is structured thematically, opening with images of birth and innocence, progresses through studies of witchcraft, occultism, anxiety and monsters and concludes with representations of death and the afterlife. Eighteenth-century Italian illustrator Giovanni Battista Piranesi is on display through a print of a ruinous imaginary prison, alongside droll, ominous work by American illustrator and writer Edward Gorey and original pen-and-ink Frankenstein pages by comic book horror artist Bernie Wrightson.
Del Toro, 52, said monsters have fascinated him since his youth because “they let us breathe a sigh of relief. They, in a way, make people feel more at ease with the monstrosity of their imperfection. Commercials and romantic movies make you feel imperfect, and they sell you products to make you feel more perfect. To not sweat, to be more tanned, to look thinner. Monsters just are what they are.”
“I get enraptured by these creatures … the cohabitation of the grotesque and the sublime. Throughout the history of art, we’ve had to do portraiture of angels alongside portraits of demons and monsters. They are a theater of the mind.
“I am a horror director in terms of kinship with the monsters,” Del Toro said. “But I’m not interested in hating them and fearing them. I believe in loving them. In most movies, your kinship is the humans and the monsters are the scary creatures. In my movies, the scary things are the humans.”
Info: new.artsmia.org