"Ars longa, vita brevis"

(All images belong to the Wellcome Collection) 

Yesterday I visited the Death: A Self-Portrait exhibition at the Wellcome Gallery, a friendly invitation to explore your own mortality this winter. The exhibition contains around 300 pieces and it was assembled by Richard Harris, a former antique print dealer from Chicago.

Some of the pieces I like the most were the Metamorphic Postcards, like the one that is the image of the exhibition, “Tête de Mort” (1), the Memento Mori Antikamnia Chemical Company Calendar (2), Marcos Raya's calavera portraits (3) and Jacques Callot's "The Miseries and Misfortunes of War". There are other interesting art pieces by Rembrandt, Warhol, Mapplethorpe, Goya and as a central piece in one of the rooms, the disturbing "Are you still mad at me" of John Isaacs.

The exhibition is composed by five rooms:  Contemplating Death, The Dance of Death, Violent Death, Eros & Thanatos and Commemoration. One extra room shows an impressive infographic about the diseases that are killing us in the 21th Century. Something of the sort appeared recently in the BBC (en español). I guess that the winter, the end of the year and the possible end of the world (in exactly a week) are keeping us more aware of death than we usually are.

You can visit Death: A Self-Portrait until the 24th of February, and if you can't have enough of death with just the exhibition, you can also join some of the extra activities like a full day of Death on Screen on the 19 of January, or the Special Event on the 1st and 2nd of February: What Makes a Good Death?