Golgotha Too…

Dr Martin Fowler, Senior Lecturer in Fine Art, University of Cumbria, presents an exhibition of paintings: "Golgotha Too…" Statement by artist Martin Fowler, April 2025: Referencing John Bratby’s large-scale crucifixion Golgotha (1965) and drawing from Fowler’s formative experience of Portobello on the East coast of Scotland, these redux crucifixions offer a deliteralised and existentialist interpretation of the Resurrection story. Inspired by the Australian artist Sidney Nolan’s crucifixion paintings circa 1955, these small contemplative images seek to draw comparisons between the torture and death of Jesus of Nazareth circa AD 30 and a modern society shaped by the alienatory effects of neoliberal dogma. Using a range of equivalences – the heavy wooden groynes which line Portobello beach form the cross; the bolts holding them together become the nails fixing Jesus’s body in place, and the North Sea substitutes for the Sea of Galilee - these atheist Presbyterian images depict an impoverished world of violence and sadism in which the universal human suffers as, from beyond the edge of the picture, a wave breaks on a distant shore and black smoke drifts across an empty blue sky.