In an era saturated by endlessly reproducible images, Catherine Gran proposes a strange archaeology of collective imagination. Presented online by PM Gallery in collaboration with Artsy.
XX Century Necropolis unfolds as a ten-day digital exhibition in which one drawing is revealed each day, transforming the rhythm of online viewing into a ritual of excavation and remembrance.
You can find the artworks everyday on our Artsy account :
https://www.artsy.net/viewing-room/pm-gallery-mass-cult-necropolis
Gran’s series, executed in ink on paper, approaches the major icons of twentieth-century popular culture not as living protagonists, but as relics already entering the domain of history. Batman, Barbie, Mickey Mouse, Pac-Man, Tintin, Mario, Superman, Princess Peach, Captain America, and the anonymous Stormtrooper reappear here as funerary monuments, abandoned memorials, or overgrown ruins. Their narratives have ended; what remains are traces, symbols, infrastructures, and debris.
Rather than celebrating nostalgia, Gran examines the mechanisms through which mass culture survives beyond its original moment. Her drawings suggest that popular icons do not disappear, they fossilize. Detached from entertainment, commerce, and spectacle, these figures become archaeological objects charged with ambiguity: at once intimate and collective, comic and solemn, absurd and sacred.
The exhibition’s title deliberately evokes both the cemetery and the museum. Gran treats the mythology of mass entertainment with the visual gravity traditionally reserved for historical painting or commemorative sculpture. Her meticulous cross-hatching transforms cartoon imagery, gaming systems, patriotic emblems, and cinematic symbols into dense monochrome compositions of remarkable material presence. Stone, foliage, metal, smoke, feathers, and ornament acquire equal importance under her hand. The result is neither parody nor homage, but a form of cultural stratigraphy. Particularly striking is the way absence structures the series. Superman survives only through domestic remnants stacked like votive relics. Captain America dissolves into patriotic décor. Mario persists as a network of pipes and conduits stripped of action. Pac-Man appears fossilized within a funerary stele engraved “Game Over.” Even Barbie — perhaps the quintessential icon of manufactured perfection — collapses into mourning beneath winter trees. Gran repeatedly removes the heroic body in order to expose the symbolic machinery surrounding it.
If the twentieth century produced its own pantheon, XX Century Necropolis imagines its afterlife.
Released progressively from 10 to 20 May, the exhibition adopts the temporal logic of serial culture while simultaneously slowing it down. Each work appears alone for twenty-four hours, encouraging sustained contemplation rather than endless scrolling. In this measured cadence, Gran’s necropolis unfolds less like an online exhibition than like a sequence of epitaphs. The series ultimately raises a larger question: what becomes of collective myths once belief has faded? Gran offers no definitive answer. Instead, she constructs a cemetery where entertainment, memory, consumerism, childhood, nationalism, and fantasy coexist in fragile suspension — monumentalized, decomposing, and strangely alive.
