Nick Cave
The Devil – A Life
14 December 2024—9 March 2025
Voorlinden, Wassenaar, The Netherlands
At Voorlinden, Nick Cave (1957) will have his first solo museum exhibition with his series The Devil – A Life. The Australian artist is primarily known as a musician but studied visual art in his earlier years. In this series, Cave narrates the life of the devil, from his birth to his death, through seventeen hand-painted ceramic figures. Museum Voorlinden has acquired the entire series and is proud to exhibit them from 14 December 2024.
Nick Cave’s The Devil – A Life (2020-24) is a series of glazed ceramic figurines depicting the life of the Devil in 17 stations, from innocence through experience into confrontation of our mortality. Nick Cave was inspired by Staffordshire flatback figurines, which became popular mantelpiece decorations in the Victorian period. The series is Cave’s first major body of visual work, culminating in his first solo museum exhibition.
It is a visual narrative that explores the complexities of the human condition. Rather than depicting a fearsome Antichrist, Cave portrays the Devil as a flawed, relatable figure, illustrating the blend of good and bad inherent in everyone. Through his experience of the vicissitudes of life in a very human way, he becomes a symbol of humanity’s darker, irrational sides, while also embodying our shared desire to be and do better. The story’s trajectory is inspired by the Stations of the Cross, a series of fourteen images depicting Jesus Christ on the day of his crucifixion. In his series, Cave shows how the Devil evolves with the passage of time, accompanied by symbolic figurines like a blood-red monkey and red, black and white horses —the colours of the three steeds ridden by the horsemen of the Apocalypse from the Book of Revelation.
