An exhibition opening later this month at the newly renovated Wellcome Trust will bring artists, writers, sociologists and cultural commentators together to discuss the impact of sleep and dreams on artistic creativity. From the nightmarish visions of Bosch and Goya, to the disembodied emotions of the Surrealist movement, to the otherworldly vitrines of contemporary artist Mariele Neudecker, artists have always drawn on nocturnal slumber for inspiration.
Artistic approaches to dreams almost invariably fall into two categories: fear and horror of the unknown and the hazy world of nostalgia. Both are mesmerising. But I like the art that deals with a kind of sleep ennui.
There's the deadpan film of Rodney Graham zonked out on the backseat of a car, doped up on Halcion, as he is driven through the drizzly streets of Vancouver. Or take digital art collective Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries: their net.art work, The Art Of Sleep, offers us the un-earth-shattering discoveries of an insomniac. It might not make for the most visually stunning exhibition, but a collection of art works inspired by the simple act of physical inactivity has a certain charm. Also worth mentioning is AK Dolven's film of a couple sleeping on a bed - even unconscious they reveal a great deal about their relationship.
Ultimately, however, no exhibition about sleep would be complete without Andy Warhol's 1963 film of that name. As an artist turned latter-day prophet, Warhol once explained that he made Sleep because: "I could never finally figure out if more things happened in the 60s because there was more awake time for them to happen in (since so many people were on amphetamine), or if people started taking amphetamine because there were so many things to do that they needed to have more awake time to do them in ... Seeing everybody so up all the time made me think that sleep was becoming pretty obsolete, so I decided I'd better quickly do a movie of a person sleeping."
