Angelus Mortem is a sculpture made of used furs obtained from furriers in New York, where they were brought in for repair and never collected. Canadian artist Tau Lewis often makes use of found materials, choosing them because of their history and links to past lives. She regards them as remnants of specific people or entire social groups. Lewis’s choice of this strategy is a conscious reference to the approach of processing matter found in African-American culture, which the artist identifies with and draws from. Her art is influenced by figures such as Lonnie Holley and Purvis Young, who created assemblages from found objects to convey the experiences of the African-American community in the southern United States. Fascinated by “non-professional” art, Lewis has never received formal artistic training herself.

In Angelus Mortem, the artist draws inspiration from ceremonial masks used by the Yoruba people, an ethnic group from Nigeria and Benin. The Yoruba perceived the masks as tools for communicating with their ancestors that allowed spiritual reincarnation in another character. Another inspiration for her work is the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, in whose texts the voices and histories of ancestors come back to life. Angelus Mortem also alludes to religious motifs, especially biblical angels, capturing the dissonance between their infantile, pop-cultural representations and their originally violent image. Angels guarded and defended sacred spaces. The angel of death can therefore be both a figure accompanying the dying and a protector of the afterlife and its secrets.

This work by Tau Lewis is one of three monumental masks created by the artist for the 2022 Venice Art Biennale. It corresponds to one of the key themes of the MSN collection: the reversal of matter, revealing the unsettling and ambiguous nature of everyday objects.

[S.M.]