THIS IS THE GATE OF HEAVEN: 'a magic bullet for these dark times'

Paul Renner Die Weihung Der Bar/ The Consecration of the Bar

This is the first joint exhibition in London and first full collaboration by Paul Renner and Paul Sakoilsky. Working around themes of transformation, corruption and conservation, the show will present a banquet of the senses and a magic bullet for these dark times.

Paul Renner The Honey Press

THIS IS THE GATE OF HEAVEN refers to the numerous doors of Gallery 46, where Renner & Sakoilsky show their latest art works. Here the artists traverse a multi-dimensional labyrinth within the gallery’s three 18th century terraced houses and a series of 7 specially created rooms.

Renner creates environments where the aesthetic takes on the infinite, where all divisions collapse and the six senses fuse into one. His method is anarchic, subversive and experimental, following William Blake’s words: ´The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’. And if it doesn’t, so much the better.’ Sakoilsky’s darkly humorous, subversive media hijackings of his potlatch newspaper ‘The Dark Times’sit alongside the iconography of expressive cityscapes, at once banal and cosmological, revealing the barbarity and beauty of contemporary London. And a series of still lifes accords with another of Blake’s notions – the glimpsing of Heaven in a grain of sand.

Sakoilsky. All Needs Catered [Still Life With Black Plastic Flowered Skull, Wine And Cannabis]

The artists first met working for the Viennese Aktionnist, Hermann Nitsch, in his Orgien Mysterien Theater.
At the core of both their work is a vital, sensual and conceptual engagement with the world, embracing
travel, arcane histories, pataphysical realities, and a shared fascination with historical and contemporary
artwork, as well as the literature of the ‘anti-tradition’. Renner and Sakoilsky have exhibited and
collaborated in past group expositions, most recently, ‘Transformazione’ at the Palazzo Ducale, Massa,
Italy (2017).

Sakoilsky. Still Life With Pigs Head