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Thomas Houseago Makes Ancient Objects Speak to Our Violent Present

His latest show, "Death’s Sacred Mirror" in London, brings antiquities, modernist sculpture and the artist's own raw figures into a charged meditation on trauma, mortality and present-day strife.

The greatest artists are those who confront the history of humanity, questioning how to find a place and meaning within it and how they can contribute to its advancement in the present and the future. This is particularly true of those who work with the most ancient and primal media. Sculpture puts minds and hands in direct contact with the physical materials given by the natural world, as well as with a rich archive of forms accumulated over centuries. Some artists, Thomas Houseago among them, lean more heavily into this engagement with the past. Through his work, he deliberately explores the realms of the collective unconscious, resurfacing archetypal forms and memorial traces that have been shared and resisted over centuries of human making.

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In June, during London Gallery Weekend, Observer visited Houseago’s latest exhibition, “Death’s Sacred Mirror,” at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, where he has staged a rich cabinet of curiosities spanning thousands of years of sculptural history. Cycladic figures, rare Celtic artifacts, medieval alchemical vessels and works by modernist artists ranging from Henry Moore and Jacob Epstein to postwar names such as Louise Bourgeois and Lucio Fontana are presented in dialogue with Houseago’s own sculptures. Conceived as a personal archaeology of influences, the cacophonic dialectic of aesthetics in the room resolves into a polyphony of voices from history that Houseago treats as a physical inheritance to unearth and confront, rather than simply to honor and imitate.

"Death's Sacred Mirror" Artists: Thomas Houseago and others Venue: Lévy Gorvy Dayan Address: 1st Floor, 35 Dover St, London W1S 4NQ Through: September 19, 2026

We were lucky to visit just as Houseago was taking installation shots, and we were able to embark on a long, inspiring conversation about the show, his approach and its particular relevance at this moment in civilization. He described the London show as emerging from the aftermath of a breakdown and from his long-standing relationship with Dominique Lévy, who, he says, gave him total freedom in the gallery. This allowed him to create what he admitted is “a very heavy show.” It turned into, as he put it, a strange, dark journey of hope. “I was making sculptures in my head from these really weird, mythical things I had experienced during various states of my breakdown. Dominique kept asking me, ‘Where does this come from?’ and we began a discussion.”

Most of the works on view—his own as well as those of ancestors from different places and times—represent........

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