The prize has existed since 2000 and was founded by the Broere Foundation in memory of Monique Zajfen, a beloved friend of the Broere family and former owner of Gallery 121 in Antwerp.
#Art memento mori full
The Vincent Van Gogh Biennial Award for Contemporary Art in Europe (to give it its full title) is the Netherlands’ major biennial prize for European contemporary art. The Vincent Award & the Monique Zajfen Collection Hanging these works in the same space as Damien Hirst’s etchings creates a surprising confrontation and an interesting tension between the two. Their macabre, morbid atmosphere evokes nightmarish images. This exhibition includes a selection of Bresdin and Redon prints in which death is a key preoccupation. As a Symbolist artist, his student Redon expressed his inner feelings in visionary, dreamlike images and depictions of imaginary beings. His etchings and drawings are remarkable for their detail and technical precision. Their colourful spread wings accompany the skulls in a regular pattern that suggests infinity.īresdin was a French artist well-known for his drawings, lithographs and engravings. Hirst chooses butterflies because they also symbolize metamorphosis and resurrection.
#Art memento mori series
Because of their short lifecycle, the butterflies that also feature in the series stand for the transitory nature of life. The skulls depicted in Hirst’s Memento etchings are a reminder of death they give a final image of a face. In these sketches, Hirst represents human mortality in a more clinical way, in which decay does not inspire either fear or resignation in the face of death. Before he produced it, he made a series of sketches, one of them inscribed with the title Death Explained. But the theme continued to be a major source of inspiration in succeeding centuries.ĭamien Hirst’s diamond-studded skull entitled For the Love of God (2007), exhibited in the Rijksmuseum in 2008, is an iconic part of his oeuvre. It was particularly popular in the seventeenth century, when innumerable paintings pointed to the vanity of earthly existence, symbolised not just by skulls, but by a host of other objects, such as wilting flowers, clocks and snuffed candles. The memento mori theme in his work is therefore far less menacing and admonitory.Ī warning of the constant threat of death and the precariousness of life on earth, the memento mori theme appears regularly in works of art down the centuries. Bresdin and Redon saw death as a mystery passing human understanding, whereas Hirst takes a contemporary view of death as an event that can increasingly be fended off by medical interventions. The somber theme of the show – the Latin phrase in the title means ‘remember that you will die’ – is illustrated by a series of Hirst’s 2008 Memento etchings (from the Monique Zajfen Collection), displayed in dialogue with the works of Rodolphe Bresdin (1822-1885) and his student Odilon Redon (1840-1916) (from the collection of the Gemeentemuseum). The warm relationship between the artist and the museum is confirmed this summer by a new exhibition, entitled Memento mori, in the museum’s Vincent Award Room.
There was an opportunity to see this last year in the Gemeentemuseum’s exhibition The Anatomy Lesson. Damien Hirst (b.1965) is not only fascinated by death, but likes to draw on traditional art historical themes and examples to inspire his work.
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