Throughout the 1980s, Ken Unsworth devised perplexing narrative scenes in which he depicts symbolic objects. Painted in an expressionistic style using subterranean materials, the bitumen and aluminum forms of Night rituals mark out scenes steeped in brute force and psychological foreboding. 

Here, tortured figures inspired by gaki – the hungry ghosts Unsworth observed in twelfth-century Japanese scroll paintings – are subjected to cruel inversions and physical struggles. Their poses also relate to Unsworth’s performances of the 1970s, which saw him prop up and hang his own body in fleshy, post-minimalist sculptures. Obscure black shapes act as backdrops or props and are accompanied by commonplace objects made menacing and peculiar. As the artist has explained, ‘Night rituals perhaps expresses somewhat overtly and needlessly, an inner dreamlike landscape of inescapable conflicts and fears that border on erotic and sustaining neurosis’.