The Pietýs of Rini Hurkmans
From the beginning of her art career on Dutch artist Rini Hurkmans uses several techniques and media to find expression for her ideas and intuitions. Photography, video, installation and sculpture are the artistic languages she utilise, emphasizing that it is not outer appearance that is central in her work but conceptual aspects and content.
Until 1997, the sculptures she created were ambiguous, cocoon-like biomorphic forms, placed on ‘pedestals’, or hanging in a metal framework. In 1993, she started to make a photograph of herself, positioned between one of her sculptures and a pedestal. Her first Pietý came into being. It is an intriguing work, because on one side she accentuates the biomorphic nature of her sculpture, and herself as its creator or ‘mother’, at the other hand there is a feeling of lost, of melancholy and lifelessness; for a Pietý refers to the religious image of Virgin Mary, holding the inanimate body of Christ on her lap. A passionate representation of love and lost, life and death, but also of salvation and therefore of comfort.
Hurkmans decided to make this first Pietý the beginning of a new series of work, as a specific kind of self-portrait, which will be redone every two year, in a new setting. The only recurring part is the central and frontal positioning of the artist herself, motionless, holding some kind of object on her lap. The series is always done in black and white, making the photograph more abstract, even less anecdotal. With each new Pietý, the surrounding space and the shape on the woman’s lap vary.
In the course of time the series also has undergone a subtle but significant shift of emphasis, or actually two shifts. First, starting with her own work of art as object held in front of her, the nature of this object gradually changes and become more related to its surrounding. Second, the surrounding itself has also been submitted to a transformation. The first photographs were taken within an interior, a space confined by walls. Strikingly enough, in most cases they are spaces with industrial features. Gradually the walls disappear and become open space: a city, a field. It is noticeable that in the latest photograph she returns to an interior but the interior appears to be demolished and light from the outside world is entering the space through large windows.
This double shift of object and ground runs parallel with a change in Hurkmans’s other works. The artist’s attention is no longer aimed at her own artistic of personal world but is opening to the world and recent human history. But as always it is about lost and comfort. For a memorial park in Buenos Aires, she has designed a sculpture in homage to the kidnapped-disappeared and murdered by the state terrorism in Argentina. For The Netherlands she has made a monument against senseless violence. She also has made a video-installation inspired by one of the tragic consequences of the war between Iran and Iraq: the lost of young lifes.
So, the world and global events, often related the role human aggression, gradually enter Hurkmans’s body of work, including her unique self-portraits or Pietýs. In this series the artist is linking the private and the public, human aggression and empathy, lost and comfort. The artist is not a person who is working within the confinement of the studio, so she seems to state, but has to keep the eyes and the mind open to the actual, global situation we live in.
The series as a whole shows the intriguing development of her work as a reflection of the changing Zeitgeist.
Bert Steevensz, art critic, Amsterdam, January 2007