Chicago-based illustrator Peter Mohrbacher personifies the forces and guardians of the cosmos. In 2005, upon discovering the thousands of named angels that existed throughout the world’s mythologies, Mohrbacher began his “Angelarium” project. Each of the ethereal creatures in his gallery is portrayed within imaginative alternate dimensions, contextualized by their watery, earthen, and celestial elements. While angels in Western mythology tend to fall into the binary of good/evil, Mohrbacher’s depictions are decidedly neutral, embodying everything from the haloed light of the stars, to the masked duplicity of the eclipse, to the mutilated body of anger. As panoplies of experience, emotion, culture, and myth, each angel is infinitely interpretable.
Images © Peter Mohrbacher