Atelier Van Lieshout

Operating Table with Devil

2021

Mixed media
180 x 160 x 199 cm

Life and death go hand in hand in operating theatres. It’s where the medical belief in engineerability clashes with the unpredictability and irrationality of fate. It’s also the place where the sins of human kind are visited upon the individual, be it a disease or deformation resulting from environmental pollution or ailments caused by fastfood and a rushed life.

In Operating Table with Devil the natural order of things has been deeply disturbed. A baby performs its own ceasarian not unlike the monsterous extraterrestials in Alien while the mother gives birth to a grown man. Freudian sexuality, fear of the future and the utter failure of scientific rationality come together in this surrealist sculpture.

Operating Table with Devil (2021) was part of the following exhibition(s):
Kelder – Obsessions, BRUTUS, Rotterdam (NL), 2022
EHBO, Galerie Ron Mandos, Amsterdam (NL), 2021 – 2022

For enquiries: please contact Atelier Van Lieshout via info@ateliervanlieshout.com