In September/ October 2024 Lumen Travo Gallery presents the solo show Pietà, Millefleurs by Rini Hurkmans. Through these work, she continues exploring how artworks can raise contemporary ethical questions in society by taking inspiration from two extraordinary artworks from history. In this presentation, one recognizes her recurring concepts of absence and loss, in relation to ethics and politics.

The core concepts in her work developed since she participated in the MoMA PS1 Artist in Residence program in 1992. At the time, at a photo fair in New York, she bought a press photograph of the moment just after Michelangelo's Pietà (1499) was attacked in the St. Peter's Basilica in Rome in 1972. Since then, she created many works using the theme of the Pietà – emotions of love and sorrow that come with loss – as a starting point.

A Pietà, an image of a mother with the body of her deceased son – deprived of life by a fellow human – in her lap, not only represents the loss of the humane but also incites questions about how we act and relate to each other and our surroundings. Global disruption of human values and the natural environment is the result of unjust power structures and economic interests. Accordingly, a growing loss of harmonious and symbiotic coexistence with each other and our environment is at stake.

In this context, she has been captured again by the work La Dame à la Licorne [The Lady and the Unicorn] (1500), a series of tapestries designed in Paris, woven in Flanders, and on display at Musée de Cluny in Paris. The six tapestries form an exemplary masterpiece in the millefleurs style, a background motif of small flowers and plants used for various crafts and especially in French and Flemish tapestries of the late 15th and early 16th centuries, the same period when Michelangelo made his first Pietà in Italy.

As the ruined and restored reaching gesture of the mother in Michelangelo’s Pietà plays an important role in Hurkmans’ work, small actions and gestures define the interpretation of the tapestries. Five of the tapestries each represent one of the five senses and the sixth tapestry symbolizes the sense of the heart. The careful depiction of so many different types of plants, flowers and herbs in the tapestries, shows that the medieval artist and viewers had not only much knowledge about but also a great sense of nature.

In this exhibition, 55 woven artworks based on white blooming spring flowers bring together Hurkmans’ reflections on the Pietà and La Dame à la Licorne. In addition to the big textile installation*, works in diverse media – from beeswax sculptures to photo works and video – relate to images, meanings and experiences of gestures and various forms of loss. As such, Hurkmans makes past, present and future resonate with each other to provoke rethinking human and environmental relationships.

*The work Pietà, Millefleurs, Verdure is developed in collaboration with the TextielLab, the professional workshop of the TextielMuseum in Tilburg.