Pato Bosich, born in Chile in 1978, is a London-based contemporary artist. He graduated from Camberwell School of Art in 2004 and has exhibited in London, Europe, Latin America and the United States, including the Nationalmuseum – Stockholm, Ateneum Art Museum – Finland, The Courtauld Institute and London University in London, in Chile at the MSSA and MAM Museums, Sun Gallery in Seul, Porter Contemporary in New York, Jano Arts and Fundació Catalunya Amèrica in Barcelona, Sberbank University in Moscow, Kunstenfestival Watou, Belgium. He co-funded Three Highgate in London in October 2021 .

Pato Bosich's latest work is the result of an ongoing dialogue between the artist and antiquity. Fed and grown out of correspondences, interactions, and exchanges – on the one side with Antiquity collections at the British Museum and with Greek mythology and Classical texts on the other – the resulting series are at once a homage to the continuing physical and textual presence of these historical relics, and a re-evaluation of our relationship with the past. Although this experience is by nature fragmented and subjective, the artist strives, through his art, to achieve a unified whole.

Working from the Canon, the artist discovers that all these entities from antiquity have already been split into many different renditions all the way throughout history up to the present. However, in Antiquity, the ancient Gods and creatures, reincarnated to create new chimaeras, come to life in an updated fashion that, if fragmented, makes them whole again. In The Dying Pythia and The Apotheosis of the Hero, these ancient presences find two different realms for them to reveal themselves to us: the world of antiquity and the modern world, respectively. We must not see in this Teophany of Gods and Epiphany of Heroes, in its use of classical symbolism, another example of allegory but a new reality where these visions materialise once again every time the artist creates the stage for them to come to life, now in a total, coherent and true fashion, fascinatingly relevant for the contemporary times.

Antiquity
Inspired by the British Museum’s collections of Mesoamerica, Ancient Greece, Mesopotamia and other ancient civilisations and developed over a period of more than five years, both on-site and in his studio, this imaginative series of works on paper using pencil, ink, and wine are the artist’s response to the materiality and iconography of the antiquities, as a result of his fascination for their fragmentation over the course of history.
In many ancient cultures, the supernatural and the fantastic are accessed through the qualities of the animal, and a recurrent theme in this series is the metamorphoses of both animal and human, in particular that of the female form. Ancient art has an evocative presence that is never merely visual and, as a result, the artist’s multi-sensory response to the antiquities give a tactile quality to his drawings. Symbols are embodied to play and multiply with each other and new forms are reconfigured as the artist navigates these ancient époques and arrives at the present. His drawings, thus, represent a form of artistic ‘time-travel’, a fusion of past, present, and future into a cohesive whole.

The Dying Pythia
Following on the concepts developed in Antiquity, this series's vast interweaving of voices, both mythological and symbolic, is directly inspired by ancient Greek mythology and Classical texts, primarily concerning the re-working of Oedipus Rex by both Irina D in her Oedipus Complex and Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Dying of Pythia. A monochrome precious-metal palette amidst a somewhat atemporal yet Classical stage of natural spaces, barren rocks, ruins and apocalyptic environments is the background against which the Attic Tragedy occurs.
The central question is that about Fate. The priestess of Delphi (the pythia) is re-imagined old and about to die, being visited by both the living and ghosts (shades), all characters in the Oedipian saga. The conflicts that ensue renew the central tenetts of Sophocles tragedy, showing the spectator how current these Classical themes still are in our times.

The Apotheosis of the Hero
The re-evaluation of our relationship with the ancient myths and history takes now place in a contemporary environment. Elements of greek sculpture make an appearance in the form of the Hero, in a poetic, ecstatic-truth state: the Apotheosis.
We find him torn, struggling but never defeated, journeying relentlessly in a battle with Fate, while the Gods of Olympus reveal themselves amidst a contemporary setting. A procession of symbols is set in motion in playful spirit and recurs in the paintings: the tower-castle – landmark buildings and the artist's studio – the urban tree corners, the street at night, the clouds, the horse, the elated and exploding characters merging with the natural surroundings, in the city of London, where all of these visions are taking place.
 

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