Marina Warner has spent her life studying the cultural and psychological uses of imaginative tales, be they of fairies, ghosts or saints’ lives. It’s perhaps no surprise then that The Shelter of Stories, a new exhibition curated by the leading mythographer, contains much to tingle spines as well as tickle fancies.
There are artworks drawing on alternative folkloric worlds by top contemporary artists such as Paula Rego or Kiki Smith, while old master paintings confront spiritual or social horrors. It boasts a wealth of offbeat ephemera too, including Red Riding Hood as an early kids’ board game and taxidermy dioramas with a rodent fortune teller and avian peddler of love potions. The curator’s own collection of Mexican Ex Voto paintings shows how ordinary people have recorded and given thanks for overcoming their own dramas, be it fire or an inconvenient spouse.
