The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

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“Marriage” is a fitting word to find emblazoned upon this lithograph, as the work seems to combine a variety of visual tropes and expressive feelings that have recurred throughout Miriam Beerman’s career. To the left, a detailed image of the mouth of a scaled creature reflects Beerman’s longstanding interest in rendering views of animals and relating their appearances to intense human emotions. This open mouth is echoed on the right, where a rhinoceros beetle bares rows of sharp teeth—an unexpected anatomical feature born out of the artist’s interest in pictures of human and animal metamorphoses. Below, she has attached a briskly caricatured human profile to a curving and tapered body that might belong to a bird or a slug-like organism, giving occasion for both another metamorphosis and another level of visual simplification. All together, the work’s title helps to bring an overarching conceptual order to the chaotic image through its suggestion of clashing extremes. Still, as is the case across Beerman’s career, hell seems to predominate over heaven through a sense of unease and danger.