Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven
Archäologen entdecken Urwald in Ungarn
2007
Etching on 270 g/qm Zerkall Bütte paper
Suite of 6 prints, measuring 38,3 x 53,5 cm each (motive 23,0 x 28,5 cm)
Signed and dated by the artist
Out of stock
about this work
Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven came across the title of this edition Archäologen entdecken Urwald in Ungarn (Archaeologists Discover Jungle in Hungary) in a Belgian newspaper dated August 4, 2007. AMVK says: “The arbitrariness and absurdity of such a report struck me,” she said. “That the forest had always been there, but didn’t exist until seen by human eyes. Does a place become more important once it’s discovered? What changes in the notion of eternity when a gaze falls upon it? It’s the same with the images that my hand pulls from my body. I made these drawings during the last two weeks of August. I was in Berlin and had just started a new diary, where I glued that newspaper clipping onto the first page.”
This etching suite was published by Griffelkunst, Hamburg. They do not communicate the exact number of prints made.
about Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven
Since the early eighties, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven has produced an extensive oeuvre of drawings and other works on paper, as well as short videos. A straightforward feminist tone pervades in all her works, in which the erotic meets machine-fetishism. Interior, if not domestic spaces often serve as settings for her drawings and collages, from which dream-like futuristic enactments between human and machine-like forms unfold. In the nineties, handmade paper works gave way to computer graphics, while text has always featured alongside images, underlining the message of Van Kerckhoven’s proud, sometimes exhibitionist female figures like song-lyrics.
Music plays an important role in Van Kerckhkoven’s creative production in parallel to her visual output, and she and her husband Danny Devos have stood as a key pair of the Antwerp experimental music scene under the band name Club Moral (1981–now).
To contemplate the entire work of AMVK is to enter an idiosyncratic world, littered with fragments and sketchy representations from the arts, is to be confronted with abstractions, clusters of ideas and quotations ranging from occult philosophies to advanced sciences and technological concepts.
An extremely ambitious project is taking shape, one that is not satisfied with a sensitive, aesthetic representation of the world, but has set itself the task of confronting the limits of the logical and the transparent of the rational with the obscure, its unthinkable, normative opposite. A dialectic project, therefore, that cannot easily be described or organised. As dense and multiform as her techniques and performances are and as challenging as the ideas and concepts she incorporates into them, an acquaintance with her work is more like a journey through an oeuvre, which in itself is an adventurous trip through the fields of interest and focal points that have marked the counterculture over the past forty years.
(courtesy of Barbara Thumm)
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