William Daniels Last and First Men
Verdurin
Artform: Visual arts
Event date: Thu, 2nd Jul 2026 to Sat, 31st Oct 2026
London
- Exhibition
Tue, 02 Jun 2026 "> published -
Event Summary
In Last and First Men, the painter and graphic artist William Daniels breaks the spell of historical time. Admission is free
Event Description
History is a cruel trick of evolution. Humans, only dimly cognisant that all living organisms change at an imperceptible pace, narrate arbitrary watersheds into sequential timelines. If the dinosaurs were a formation in archaeological time, so were homo erectus, Medieval peasants, and men of the twentieth century. Even the apex species, in other words, is no more capable of understanding its longitudinal progress than a single-cell organism. Following Olaf Stapledon's sci-fi novel of the same title, Daniels collapses the birth of planetary systems, multiple generations of mankind, and evolutionary revolutions into the stuff they are all made of: primordial image matter. Stapledon's 1930 text is structured like an escalator; the cult novel projects the emergence of successive new breeds of men, describing their physical and mental attributes in today's language of science and psychology, as if such taxonomies would survive extinctions, rebellions, substitutions, and planetary migrations. Daniels dwells in the transhistorical language of the image, developing a technique contingent on found, everpresent textures and art historical precedent. His new series of monoblock prints, created using found wood surfaces and semi-translucent cut-outs, places all his subject matter in equal contention. UFOs, Napoleonic conquests, Alaskan masks, and screenshots from the late-night doomscroll emerge as though from the ice record. Will the human brain cells which are already today playing Doom in a lab Petri dish look any different? Stapledon's story, in which the next hundred thousand years may as well be tomorrow, relies not on the imagination but a commitment to the consequences of present reality. We do not need to, for example, wait to evolve a sixth finger, as Stapledon's "third men" would, because we can already see ourselves in this form through the evolutionary hallucinations of artificial intelligence.
Event Overview
- Event Title: William Daniels Last and First Men
- Type: Exhibition
- Date: Thu, 2nd Jul 2026 to Sat, 31st Oct 2026
-
Location:
| view on Google MapsLondon
Event: William Daniels Last and First Men
Event: William Daniels Last and First Men
Organisation: Verdurin
Postcode: N1 6TT
How to Book
No Booking Required
- Contact name: Verdurin
- Contact email: [email protected]