Annie Hemond Hotte: The Divine Comedy: Hell

Margot Samel is pleased to present The Divine Comedy: Hell, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Annie Hémond Hotte (b. 1980, Montreal, Canada). This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Inspired by Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, the exhibition takes as its point of departure the poem’s enduring vision of the afterlife as both a moral architecture and a reflection of earthly society. Written over seven hundred years ago, Dante’s epic imagines a meticulously ordered descent through the circles of Hell, drawing on Aristotelian ethics to distinguish between actions born of reason and those driven by desire. Hémond Hotte’s colorful, intricately detailed paintings revisit this subterranean geometry through a deeply personal iconography, tracing the journey of Dante and his guide Virgil while bringing into focus the poem’s timeless hierarchy of vice. The Divine Comedy: Hell is the first chapter of a trilogy of exhibitions inspired by Dante’s masterpiece.