Summer of Revelation: Artists Revisit Judgment Day

The energy is off in the art world and beyond, and this summer in particular, the weight of the unease has been hard to ignore. From exhibition censorship and defunding of art organizations to international gallery closures and unpredictable trade restrictions, all aspects of artmaking and art commerce feel perpetually in crisis. It’s only appropriate, then, that summer exhibitions from Tribeca to Sag Harbor are revisiting one of the oldest frameworks for uncertainty: the apocalypse. Speaking with artists participating in and curating these shows reveals that this reference point isn’t just an attempt to cope with contemporary collapse. It is also a means to examine how artists throughout history have metabolized the End Times as a revelatory way forward.

Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych reflects today’s siege state

One approach to navigating this moment of instability is to look backward. The group show “The Garden of Earthly Delights” at GRIMM, New York, through August 8, 2025, uses Hieronymus Bosch’s namesake triptych as its thematic anchor. The painting has long invited competing interpretations—including as a religious allegory and as a secret cult object—but what makes it endure is its capacity to reflect the tensions of any era.

“One almost feels like one is looking to Bosch for what we are supposed to do under our own emergency situation,” said the art historian Joseph Leo Koerner in an interview with the Harvard Gazette. Koerner, whose recent book Art in the State of Siege (2025) examines image-making in moments of duress, described Bosch as “a cipher for the present and an omen for the future.” Similarly, a spokesperson for GRIMM told Observer that, “The deceptive positiveness in the title of the original Bosch work, with its descriptions of heaven and hell in the painting itself, seemed like an apt one for a summer show in New York, especially in the current socio-political climate of the United States.”

Several artists in the exhibition created new work in direct dialogue with Bosch. Two artists, Matthew Day Jackson and Anthony Cudahy, offered divergent but complementary readings of the contemporary siege state: one macrocosmic and geologic, the other intimate and embodied.

Jackson’s Anthropocene Reliquary (2025) reckons with systems of faith in image-making. He updates the titular Christian worship apparatus by adding to the sculpture of the presumed sanctified remains a sample of what he calls “a material believed to be Trinitite,” a glass-like waste product of the U.S.’s first atomic bomb test in 1945. This move ties back to the outer wings of Bosch’s triptych, which depict the Third Day of Creation in grisaille. However, instead of the divine manifestation of plants and trees, Jackson positions a pseudo-geological byproduct of apocalyptic technology as a sacred object in a different belief system.

As Jackson put it, this moment is not a rupture. “We are part of a continuum—our moment is a punctuation mark in a much longer geologic sentence,” he said. “But we are also animals, possessed of both an extraordinary ability to adapt and a tragic propensity for catastrophe—made real through the very creativity that defines us.”

Cudahy’s contribution to the show echoes this inescapability of fate: a self-portrait of the artist leaning over a table, with his hand nudging a spider toward a chain of animals devouring one another. The work takes the cycles of consumption and cataclysm in Bosch’s vision as a metaphor for the enmeshment of humans and nature.

“Our thinking of ourselves as different, set apart and moral, allows us to behave in destructive, uncaring ways towards other humans, other species and to our world,” Cudahy explains. At the same time, accepting the cycle can be a way forward. “It’s a small comfort that every time period ever sensed and feared an imminent apocalypse,” he shared, noting that “repressing that energy can only be destructive.”

Resurrecting nineteenth-century visions of empire and salvation

For Los Angeles-based painter Chad Murray, parallels with the contemporary moment can be drawn to an earlier age of apocalypse—specifically, the 19th-century moment when nation-building collided with Christian cosmology. In Sebastian Gladstone gallery’s “John of Patmos,” a title referencing the traditionally acknowledged author of the Book of Revelation, Murray presented a series of paintings investigating the art-historical lineage of eschatology.

The works were inspired by Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire (1833-1836), a series of five paintings charting the cycle of human culture from Eden to the End Times, as well as John Martin’s The Last Judgement (1851-1853), a triptych inspired by Revelation. “Cole watched as the world around him moved rapidly into an uncertain future and reflected that anxiety in The Course of Empire, depicting the rise and fall of a fictional society because of the imperial expansion that he witnessed firsthand,” Murray observed. “Martin witnessed similar changes take shape in England but engaged with the uncertainty through salvation.”

Murray’s interest in Christian apocalyptic language wasn’t coincidental. In the artist’s words, “It seems fitting to use the language and imagery of Christianity because of its ubiquitous influence in American society.”

Yet the exhibition was far from religious. Instead, it dissected the trajectory of doomsday imagery over time. Cole and Martin’s paintings ultimately explored the sublime against the backdrop of American and British industrialization and empire-building. Drawing on this art-historical lineage, Murray’s works positioned a fictional civilization as a timeless placeholder for what it means when one age of catastrophe borrows its visual vocabulary from another.

“The story is both compelling enough and cryptic enough to persist throughout history, dangling in the near future for generations,” said Murray.

The Deluge as a blueprint for creativity and community

In Sag Harbor, another group show explores a tale that has persisted for centuries: the biblical Deluge. “The Ark” at The Church through September 1, 2025, offers up a selection of animal sculptures by more than forty artists of the past century curated by Eric Fischl, the acclaimed artist and a co-founder of the nonprofit exhibition space. The show’s maritime theme resonates deeply in this historic whaling village and its deconsecrated house of Methodist worship. However, for Fischl, the exhibition centers on two concepts in particular: the original flood as an allegory of the creative process and the selection of specific subjects to invite community and conversation.

“There are many cultures that share the same archetype of god or gods realizing their disappointment with man and wanting to start over again by deluge or plague, wanting to turn the wrath of nature on them, resetting the clock,” said Fischl. “Implicit in these myths is the insistence that there is a positive future in which man’s harmony with nature, with their god’s vision of perfect union, is worth the trial and error… As an artist, how can you not respond to that?”

In Fischl’s view, the show responds to broader divisions in public life by turning back to ecology. “Our country is tearing itself apart because we can no longer find the themes and beliefs that are so important to us as a community,” he said. So why animals in this context? “Simple. No one talks to each other in an elevator until the dog shows up.”

By organizing a show around a cross-cultural symbol like the Ark, Fischl hopes to carve out space for reflection without didacticism. “It is my unshakable belief that Art is central to healing our fears, anxieties and collective wounds because Art makes visible and concrete all that we share,” he told Observer. “Art creates experiences that open our empathy channels and reinforces what brings us together in our common space rather than what culls us from the herd.”

It’s tempting to think of the apocalypse as a singular event. But these exhibitions suggest that Armageddon is better understood as a living archive that artists have mined across epochs, often to investigate whether the same images that have terrified us for centuries might also contain clues for how to repair the present.

As Jackson put it: “We find ourselves in a strange moment—one where fact and fiction blur within a social, political and economic landscape that often feels like dystopian fantasy. But this is just a moment, not the end of anything. I resist the narrative of collapse and the anxiety around such a notion. I believe we are still on the right path—it’s just unusually rough right now, and we may not be the beneficiaries of our successes or failures.”

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