Passage and Crossings

There has been a public debate—at times a very heated and rancorous debate—between contingents of the Catholic Church and the arts community of Cologne, Germany. The community that commissioned and installed Gerhard Richter’s radiant stained glass windows in the Cologne Cathedral, commissioned architect Peter Zumthor’s scrupulously designed, meditative masterpiece, the Kolumba Museum, and have now permanently installed David Rankin’s deeply moving, aspirational, five-meter high painting, the Passage and Crossings triptych, in St. Agnes Church, is the same community that last year heard their Archbishop denounce contemporary art as representing a degenerate culture.

Daniel Gold

Courtesy of the artist.

There has been a public debate—at times a very heated and rancorous debate—between contingents of the Catholic Church and the arts community of Cologne, Germany. The community that commissioned and installed Gerhard Richter’s radiant stained glass windows in the Cologne Cathedral, commissioned architect Peter Zumthor’s scrupulously designed, meditative masterpiece, the Kolumba Museum, and have now permanently installed David Rankin’s deeply moving, aspirational, five-meter high painting, the Passage and Crossings triptych, in St. Agnes Church, is the same community that last year heard their Archbishop denounce contemporary art as representing a degenerate culture.

One of the many ironies of this situation is the fact that the parishioners seem to be very proud of, and even love their artwork. The Dioceses of Cologne has a rich history of realizing devotion and amplifying faith through the expressive power of art.

In St. Agnes, the largest church in Cologne after the cathedral, David Rankin’s triptych, with its ascendant, firey and lifelike red lines of blood and spirit, which seem to lead to eternity in their simultaneously peaceful yet turbulent marks, has changed the experience of the architecture of the church.
The paintings seem to prepare you for the silence, meditation, and hope of prayer. Spending time there, you can see parishioners entering and leaving the church, pausing to reflect in front of the three quite magnificent canvasses, all of which hold and embrace the back walls of the nave of the church. The paintings have an almost canonical divinity layered through their humanity. You can feel the presence of a greater presence. The presence of our very human pain, happiness, and desire also permeates the artworks. Norbert Bauer of St. Agnes says that the people of the church—the parishioners—overwhelmingly love the paintings.

Created specifically for St. Agnes, the work alludes to many elements of the church’s dramatic history and architecture, including the dark, stark, and moving memorials in the crypt, to the martyrs of the Nazi regime. But, most of all, the triptych addresses the movement of the spirit in the passage of a human life. It is that sense of longing and aspiration that infuses this work and, most profoundly, moves its viewers.

It is exactly these qualities in the work of Rankin, Richter, and Zumthor that so effectively continues a long tradition of an intertwining between art and religion, a marriage that has at times been painful, yet nonetheless, quite fruitful. Art and the church struggle to give voice to our highest aspiration. It is clear that we long to have a deeper understanding of our human condition. Art and the church offer us access to those revelations.