Arch Hades is a woman of the word. Many of the words in the journals that are meticulously typed and printed at the end of each year are filed away in boxes and stored in its 6,000-book library. Some of these words were on display in her recent solo exhibition in London, We’re All Just Passing Through, as part of her Confessions series. “I find myself sad about the present as if it were really a memory”; “The Things You Love Are the Things You’ll Miss” has been enlarged and recreated on acrylic polymer and fiberglass to resemble crumpled pieces of paper. After all, Hades is a poet, so the words come naturally.
However, she is not someone who takes words for granted. Born in Russia, she fled from St. Petersburg to England as a child after her father was murdered. At first she was unable to speak English, but she lived in a world of silence. It was at this formative moment in her life that she truly realized how important language was to communication and belonging.
Whether it’s poetry or visual art, her ultimate goal is the same: communication. However, the transition from poetry to visual art was not a move she was anticipating, until the pandemic, when she faced a canceled book tour. In 2021, she collaborated with her friend, the musician Rak, to write her fourth poetry collection, Arcadiato NFT. “We all have bills to pay,” she said of the collaboration.
This move was not unprecedented. They had success with an NFT of a postcard a few months ago, which featured a handwritten poem by Arch, which sold for $71,410.76 at auction. But that was just a warm-up. Arcadia It was sold on a November evening at Christie’s as an abstract animated film lasting nine minutes and 48 seconds, with a soundtrack of ASMR-like electronic music. In the amount of $525,000. It became “the first multidisciplinary fine art collaborative NFT to go to auction,” the press release said, and made Hades the highest-paid poet in the world.
After this escalation, there is inevitably a pause. What’s next? With her earnings, she decided to buy a house in the British countryside to think about her next step. But what finally causes her to replace the pen with the paintbrush is a series of personal betrayals from four different people in quick succession. “I was so exhausted, I had to find a different way to express everything I was feeling inside,” she told the Observer.
Her therapist suggested she try a creative outlet without the pressure to succeed. Hades remembered that she enjoyed practicing art for her high school exams. However, her tendency toward perfection never abated. Instead of viewing painting as a casual hobby, she set out to teach herself the craft: experimenting with brushes, palette knives, gesso, mediums, and varnishes to understand the effects each could create. Its main source of education? YouTube. After a year of continuous practice, “the paintings started to appear.” It might have remained just a hobby had her friend, a prominent art collector, not insisted on buying one of her works and urged her to take her work seriously.
The paintings in question recall Edvard Munch, with solitary figures in front of large bodies
Hades publicly acknowledges the influence of other artists on her visual language. “I’ve never had such an original idea in my life,” she said, half-jokingly. Hades realizes that she is a product of what she consumes, but she also has the ability to give her perspective, inject it with new energy, and become part of the conversation. She looks to what came before her to reinterpret and build on this work, recasting it in her own language. But she’s also likely to use images from her everyday life, whether it’s the killing of crows she befriended at her local beach, a photo of a discarded suitcase she picked up in London, or a group of undercover characters she found online.
In terms of colours, a very distinct and controlled color palette appears: black, chrome, grey, red, white, with the odd touch of yellow. There is an almost Gothic sensibility to the works, a bleak Brontë-style worldview. “I never felt like a child, so I was never drawn to bright colors,” she said. If anything, they underscore her meditation on existentialism, loneliness, and the human condition.
Her take on artistic pedigree is exactly what Venice can expect from her debut, “The Return,” which opens on May 7 at the Scoletta Battioro e Tiraoro di Venezia (a decommissioned church on the Grand Canal). Hades was inspired by long-lost paintings by Gustav Klimt, and her site-specific work, which spans 22 panels and spans 13 metres, will depict 63 life-sized figures, at once isolated but blending into each other as they are directed towards the abyss at the center of the composition. In the figures, which pay homage to Greco-Roman sculpture, there are all kinds of human experiences and emotions.
“There are very few times in an artist’s life when you have the opportunity to have great success,” she said. “Venice is a beautiful place that I adore. I wanted to do something very special for it.” The work will be installed in a decommissioned church, a place that felt like a natural fit for the themes of life, death, and transcendence. “What could be more appropriate than those themes in a place like this? I knew I wanted something dramatic—something worthy of Venice.”
Besides “Return” will be presented sphinxan immersive sculptural installation, as well as new works from the ongoing Confessions series. The feeling that runs through the latter is one she returns to often: vulnerability inseparable from connection. Or as Hades herself said: “Vulnerability is the price you pay for connection.”
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