Passage Into Darkness Review – Tracey Emin takes her heroes to the gates of hell | art

TRasi Amin caught me looking at her from her selfie and trying to assess how similar they were. Not that close. This ink screen is larger than it is, and its face is wider and longer. But it is not a picture of the outside person, but rather an internal vision. As we stand before him, I seem to fall into radiant pools of blackness – crossing into darkness.

Curator curated an exhibition of the depths of winter. It is a generous and unexpected offering with an eclectic and profound openness to types of creativity that many might think incompatible: paintings, installations and performance art all encounter the night here. She places the artists she sponsors in Emin’s studios alongside her heroes Edvard Munch, Louise Bourgeois and other luminaries of modern art – if “star” is the right word in this hellish place. Because, in a stroke of lighting genius, the Carl Friedman Gallery has been plunged into a nighttime shadow that still allows you to see the art.

It starts with a concrete bra, like something that could be bulldozed to encase a skeleton. The body was gone, leaving holes for the arms, legs and neck. It’s by Antony Gormley, it’s self-made, and you wonder if he’s a bit of a Houdini so he can get away with it. Unstable images dominate this room. Munch stares like a pair of drugged, torn claws from his 1895 self-portrait, with a skeletal arm. Jolene Quackenbos, artist in residence at Emin’s Margate studios, shows three strange and startling paintings including ‘Self-Portrait as a Painter as Lucretia’, in which she sits in 18th-century costume stabbing herself. It becomes more devastating. A wailing, stuffed head, mutilated and in pain, isolated in a Plexiglas, is a bourgeois response to Munch’s cry.

Some artists responded to Emin’s sombre call with explosions of Gothic style. Lindsay Mendick has created ceramic busts of rotting zombie women whose festering sores and decaying flesh look even more repulsive in the shiny, glazed pottery. Is this horror or horror comedy? Mendick may not be so sure of herself. Painter Laura Fotis, another Emin Studios graduate, is clearly serious in her grand metaphor of business and political tycoons seated at a long conference table with Dracula’s castle hovering nearby. It smacks of conspiracy theory uncomfortably, but the exquisite detail of Baccone’s mouth screaming into a cloud of pink flesh shows what it’s capable of.

Next to Fotis’s painting are the remains of a performance by Hermann Nitsch, the Viennese movement artist who staged gruesome mass events “theater of mystery orgies” in his castle by flogging animal blood. It is a painting covered in clear lines and real blood from which emerges a skull-faced figure like a Mesoamerican god of death. It is titled “Grablegung (Burial)” design. Nearby, Anselm Kiefer displays a hammer and anvil in a Plexiglas labeled Thor, a statue that vibrates with the power of the Norse god of thunder.

Myths and monsters, floating castles, vampire orgies – dark horrors. But sometimes you see the stranger in broad daylight. Walking near his home in Suffolk at dawn, photographer Johnny Shand Kydd captures an eerie mist over icy still waters, white banks covering bare trees, and clouds looming above wind-swept reeds. These black-and-white images have their own connection with Kiefer’s legendary facades and Georg Baselitz’s 1967 painting “The Eye of Verktiger,” in which the woodsman appears with his ax breaking before our eyes, as if he had cut himself with his own axe. The final work is by Gilbert and George. Amina told me that this makes her think of the gates of hell. It is an image in which their faces appear compressed and twisted into monstrous masks amidst the harsh branches of winter that form a black portal.

She says her exhibition acknowledges the dark times we’re living in — you can fill in your nightmares yourself — but also offers solace from her experience with cancer: “I thought I was going to die but I didn’t.” There is hope in the darkness, as Stone Age crowds knew when they gathered for the winter solstice at Stonehenge. It’s the place you have to go to start over. Of course you don’t have to go through what Amin has to know that by entering the darkness we discover the light. This happens to everyone every 24 hours. You go to bed, turn off the light and step into the darkness. When we wake up everything is new. What are those fleeting ghosts at night, just dreams and fears?

For this artist it is more realistic than that. In Emin’s large new painting at the center of the show, a woman is shown lying on her bed. Above her stands a hooded visitor. It seems very scary to me, but the artist seems to see this ghost as a friend, because the painting is called “I am Protected.” Maybe we’ll all be under surveillance until we wake up soon: that’s the hope.