Culture

Five figures in a circle, hands clasped, bodies in motion - faces gone in the movement. Pure physical joy. The painting vibrates with the sound it would make if it could make one.

Hundreds of lights reflected in mirrored walls, extending in every direction without edge. Vitality as immersion - the self dissolved into a field of aliveness that has no boundary and no end.

A room-length painting for a Vienna Secession exhibition - the hostile forces, the weak humanity, and the Joy that arrives in the final panel as a choir of golden figures. Vitality as the thing that survives everything sent to extinguish it.