For this year's edition of Amsterdam Art Gallery Weekend, Lumen Travo Gallery is pleased to present the latest work by Rini Hurkmans in the exhibition Pietà, A Reconsideration of the Gesture.
In the exhibition Pietà, A Reconsideration of the Gesture, she presents works that she developed during her working period as Artist in Residence at the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (KNIR). Her research into the press photo of the moment just after Michelangelo's Pietà was attacked in 1972 serves as the starting point for her new work that also builds upon earlier work inspired by this photo since she acquired it in 1992.
The Pietà is a religious image of a mother with her dead son on her lap. It is an icon that depicts general emotions of human suffering in which loss, love, and grief come together and therefore the theme extends beyond the Christian belief. When the Pietà (1499) in the St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome was attacked by Laszlo Toth in 1972, he destroyed the left arm. Consequently, the initial gesture that reaches out to the public to engage with the theme of the Pietà was annihilated.
The gesture and the press photo are multi-interpretable and carry a duality that challenges the viewer to consider ethical issues about justice and injustice, vulnerability and strength, perpetrator and victim.
The works in the exhibition invite to reconsider the gesture, its engaging role that might include an awareness of communality, closeness, sensibility, and intuition, but might also involve gestures that disrupt, destroy, conceal, and condemn.
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Amsterdam Art Gallery Weekend Programme:
Saturday 28 November, 12.00 hrs
Marja Bloem in conversation with Rini Hurkmans. In dialogue they will talk in detail about the exhibition Pietà, A Reconsideration of the Gesture.
This event will take place online, and will be accessible via the Instagram account @lumentravogallery and the Amsterdam Art website.
Saturday 28 November
The artwork A Personal Gesture will be handed over by Rini Hurkmans to Anne Vegter
The sculpture A Personal Gesture, a copy of Maria's left arm and hand will travel from individual to individual. Each person may have it in close proximity for a predetermined period. In this way, everyone will have the possibility to ponder or consider the arm in different contexts, to provoke dialogues and question possible redefinitions of the gesture.
On Saturday November the 28th, Anne Vegter, poet and writer, chairman of the Akademie van Kunsten, will officially accept the sculpture A Personal Gesture. This act is the beginning of the journey that this sculpture will make.
The event will be streamed on Lumen Travo Gallery's Instagram account (@lumentravogallery).