Alexandra Bircken started out in fashion but ended up making art out of everything from carved-up car engines to gimp suits and bits of her body. The German artist reveals how her fascinations began .
Intense, apocalyptic and primitivist, this night scene brings to life a letter by Saint Paul in which he tells of being shipwrecked on Malta. But he makes it sound very different from today’s holiday island. Paul describes the people of Malta as prehistoric and cut off from the advanced culture of the ancient Mediterranean world around them. Elsheimer shows them naked, surely inspired by stories and stereotypes of New World peoples. He depicts Paul throwing a snake that has bitten him into the fire: Paul writes that when he survived the snake’s venom the Maltese concluded he must be a god. With its swirling seas, fire on a distant hilltop and wild people, this painting has something in common with Shakespeare’s early 1600s play The Tempest. Elsheimer’s idiosyncratic method of painting in oil on copper gives the sparks, fire and sea foam a bright sharp magic. • National Gallery, London
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