David Mach, the Scottish 1988 Turner Prize nominee, now brings us Precious Light, an exhibition at the City Art Centre as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival, subtitled King James Bible, A Celebration, 1611-2011.

Mach’s work presents traditional bible stories through contemporary allusions to pop culture and consumerism. Far from taking away from the messages of these bible stories, Mach’s collages are a visual re-imagination, making them more accessible to the contemporary viewer, and monumentalising them in homage to the 400th year of the King James Bible. Multitudes of visual metaphors create links between the traditional messages of the bible stories and Mach’s contemporary representations of them.

On the ground floor, huge metal sculptural figures of Calvary tower over us in visceral agony. Further on, collages with biblical names like City of God and The Agony and the Ecstasy present a number of figures all occupying the space in an intricately beautiful array of connected activities.

Their sources are familiar (magazines that the artist pilfers), but they now play out different roles for the artist in each of his works. The dream-like quality in Mach’s Jacob’s Ladder impression - in which figures drift through a deep, green sea, cleverly placed close to the beginning of the exhibition - floated with me throughout.

They wandered upwards through the gallery’s many exhibition spaces and were echoed in every collage I saw, becoming more and more frantic as figures multiplied and back-drops became more cinematic. The works exist on the scale of a kind of modern Last Judgement.

His work is more than just re-imagined biblical allegories. It adds an intriguing religious resonance to contemporary politics, and is particularly profound in the wake of the scenes of carnage that recently ravaged cities across England, highlighting evidence of the bible still being present in our modern day lives.

Four Stars

First published 11/10/11