“… we can easily recognize many religious motifs, images of saints and depictions of the Mother of God and the infant Jesus. The artist begins to interweave these with photographs from her own past. In a fascinating way, she combines living people she herself knows, such as her own mother, and interweaves them with the Mother of God, placing her in the center or putting a different, larger head on the depiction of the saint, which is irritating and leaves me amazed at the ease with which this seems to succeed. (…) The child, the infant Jesus, is exchanged with perhaps the brother or someone else and it becomes comprehensible for all of us that the infant can only develop with trust in its mother. (…) The artist also shows us that this cannot always succeed by allowing robotic demons to emerge, by completely blackening and veiling the mother, by building a multitude of disturbances into the relationship and we sense that we ourselves carry an enormous number of disturbances within us. “ Helm Zirkelbach on 24.04.2016, opening speech for the exhibition “Ansichtssache”
Can a mother love her son more than her daughter? Is there a special relationship between mothers and sons? The exaltation of male offspring and the devaluation of female offspring takes place primarily in patriarchal societies, but also elsewhere – e.g. here in Western culture, albeit subliminally. What is remarkable, however, is that it is often the mothers themselves who shape their children’s self-esteem through education and thus keep the vicious circle going.
For me, the archetypal image of a mother-son relationship is the subject of “Mary with the baby Jesus”. In 2015, I worked on a postcard from my collection every day – mostly motifs with Mary and child. In the end, there were 365 collages about motherhood and childhood.
This was an annual project initiated by Antje Fischer, realised together with her and Marlies Achermann-Gisinger. All the works of this project with more than 1000 postcards were presented to the public in the joint exhibition Ansichtssache (Point of View) in Münsingen.
Virtual tour through the exhibition.
