Fiona Lutjenhuis

The first exhibition of the work of Fiona Lutjenhuis in the UK will showcase this award-winning artist's vibrant painted worlds within the iconic Georgian Gallery. The lower floor of this former natural history museum will be transformed into a decent into Hell, with the upper floor becoming a watery Atlantis — extending Lutjenhuis' exploration of alternative belief systems and their relationship to the ecological crisis. 

Growing up within a cult, Lutjenhuis' upbringing was shaped by a knowledge-system that combined aspects of Christianity with beliefs in UFOs and other-worldly beings. As a child, she drew as way of taking ownership of what she was being told and to question its truth value — her use of images therefore being innately critical and sensitive to the nuances of these ideologies. Using her creative work to heal from this sometimes-harmful upbringing, Lutjenhuis balances a criticism of these kinds of cults with an understanding of how they provide answers for people in the face of uncertainty, resonating with a time when divisive politics and digital consumption drive anxiety and make people more vulnerable to popularist narratives, influencers and false news.  

Lutjenhuis’ visually compelling world-building rewires the manipulative tactics of ideological systems without discarding the important spiritual and imaginative forces that such systems can be enmeshed within. Recent works carry ideas linked to Karen Armstrong’s book Sacred Nature, 2022, which explores the "radical empathy" fostered by early religious traditions. In these systems the natural world was ascribed with an animating force: a soul flowing through rocks, plants and animals that required they be respected like people. Lutjenhuis shares Armstrong's perspective, that scientific responses to the climate emergency need to be accompanied by a spiritual shift that re-enchants our relationship to nature. 

Lutjenhuis’ existing work Seasoned Sins will occupy the lower floor of the gallery. Here she takes people through the familiar four seasons and into a fifth, to reimagine an allegory of earthly sins and their consequences in hell, mixed with an ecological sense of humanity now being out of step with natural rhythms. Autumn becomes the gates of hell, stripping those who journey beyond it of their thoughts and rendering them as distorted creatures, unable to escape their own foolishness. With spring, the sinners are tormented by the animals they were cruel to in life, propelled by their own greed through a landscape marked by agricultural and industrial suffering. In summer, sea and fire rise unbounded to devour them; a snake possessed by hunger disrupts the Patriarchal biblical allegory of Adam and Eve by eating man. In winter, the bodies are thrown in to a pit of demons, from which vantage point the earth is revealed. The source of the sinner’s suffering comes from their belief in human exceptionalism, placing themselves above nature.   

New murals will be realised across all the spaces to support the feeling of an immersive, painterly and surreal environment. Whilst the lower floor becomes a space of earthly transgressions and hellish judgement – mixes of greens, browns and fire oranges – upstairs will become the watery realm of Atlantis.  

In Atlantis – around the balcony – Lutjenhuis will present new works part inspired by writer Charles-Joseph de Grave (born in Ursel, formally the Netherlands and now Belgium). Published posthumously, his book, Atlantis, claimed that the legendary island first described by Plato was to be found in the Netherlands / Belgium, and that the Underworld visited by Odysseus was located at the mouth of the river Rhine. Inspired by the freedom to imagine these spaces, Lutjenhuis will present an invented series of yet-to-be-discovered fish in the bays of the former museum. In previous times this kind of creation was God’s prerogative, but Lutjenhuis will foreground the importance of fantasy and artistic creation in our relationship to the natural world, opening to full spectrum of human capacities to connect with the mysteries of nature.