Catherine Bertola
From the Archives, 2010
Digitally printed acrylic and vinyl
Cancer Centre, St Bartholomew’s Hospital
Bertola draws on the 18th century fashion for “print rooms”, where a room was decorated with prints pasted onto the walls and embellished with drawings of swags and ribbons to lend an illusion of three-dimensionality. Creating a modern interpretation, the artist references the architecture of James Gibbs whose 18th century buildings form the historic square at Barts.
The images the artist has used are all taken from the Barts archive and bring to the new Cancer Centre some of the atmosphere of the hospital’s illustrious past.