In his forty-fifth Year, David Van Gough embarked upon a series which would finally confront the daunting shadow cast by his most famous ancestor, and the inevitable connotations of that surname.

Adopting the characterization of Vincent Van Gogh as martyr, and recapitulating stanza’s from Shakespeare’s Tempest as themes of metaphorical exile – Purgatorium (Latin for the place in between) sets a chronological backdrop of imagined personal biography from birth to death, against an undercurrent of ancient sinister architecture, and the desolate stillness of the shipyards of his Liverpool childhood.

An epic aphorism, Purgatorium is Gough’s contemporary exorcism, an ode from the artist as forgotten alchemist, examining the painters role as both confessor and inquisitor, in a continued tortured state of crippling self evaluation, against the burgeoning detritus of modern assimilation.

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