Aline Thomassen / Ana Mendieta

 

Ana Mendieta

Silueta (image from Yagul)

color photograph

1973

Ana Mendieta

untitled (Death of a Chicken)

photographs from performance

1972

 

 

Naked Woman: Being the Image + Making the Image

 

How different it can be if the human condition is visualized by the eyes and the

feelings and the body of a woman.

 

In Ana Mendieta's work you feel so clearly that the content, the vision of art and life belongs to a woman, while at the same time her powerful performances, photographs and land art transcend into an experience that goes far beyond being a woman.

 

The unconditional surrender to trauma, pain and anger as the incendiary force to expose the human condition made a deep impression on me.

 

I had just graduated from the academy when I discovered Mendieta at a major solo show of her work in Barcelona. Although she used a different medium than painting, that medium I was madly in love with, I saw in her for the first time an artist with whom I felt real affinity.

 

The artist Ana Mendieta turns being a woman into a subversive power; a positive, transformative force, demanding visibility and shriveling the paradigms of the modernist art-historical canon.

 

Aline Thomassen, 2022

Aline Thomassen

untitled

2014

watercolour on paper

249 cm x 154 cm

collection Bonnefantenmuseum Maastricht

Aline Thomassen (NL)

untitled

2018

watercolour and pastel on paper

215 x 114 cm

www.alinethomassen.com

Ruben Bellinkx / Stanley Kubrick

 

Stanley Kubrick

Still from the film The Shining

1980

35mm, colour, sound, 146’

 

 

When I first saw Stanley Kubrick's film 'The Shining' 25 years ago, the famous elevator scene left a deep impression on me. So much that there was a period that every new idea for a work of art was measured against this scene. 

In this scene (which is a work of art in itself), we are presented with a very aesthetic and balanced image that is at the same time very disturbing. With very recognisable elements, an unseen situation is created that we are left guessing about. I am also looking for this tension and contradiction in my own work. For me, good art should seduce and wring.

 

Ruben Bellinkx, 2022 

Ruben Bellinkx (BE)

Still from the film Double Bind

2020

35mm, colour, sound, 11’04

www.rubenbellinkx.com