Friends

2021

Mixed media
135 x 70 x 175 cm

The drama of all-consuming love: you can’t live with or without one another. The other’s absence makes you vulnerable to poisonous influences from the outside world. These are kept at bay when you are linked to your other half, yet this locks you into a bubble with a limited quantity of oxygen. The breath of life you gift each other keeps getting less beneficial and, over time, even becomes deadly.

Friends is one of the first sculptures from the Sacrifice series. The latter depicts the gamut of human characteristics and emotions during crises. Cruelty and revenge go hand in hand with self-sacrifice, illumination and deep love. Life revealing itself as a surrealist succession of contradictions.

The man and woman in Friends are still surviving together. That their closed system is untenable and just as fatal as the danger their hazmat suits protect them from, is irrelevant to them.

Friends (2021) was part of the following exhibition(s):
EHBO, Galerie Ron Mandos, Amsterdam (NL), 2021 – 2022

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