AMVK: DrawingsEnsemble from M HKA Ensembles

Ensemble: AMVK: Drawings

The work of Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven (AMVK) arises from graphic notes, drawings in which she records her streams of thoughts. For her, drawing is a form of understanding, it ensures that observations can be simplified and made manageable. The drawings are graceful and dynamic. They bear witness to vulnerability, suffering and fearful visions.

The artist speaks primarily with images, strongly condensed images, that do not immediately reveal their meaning. She often combines her drawings with text, in captions or in titles. The language-image associations force the viewer to reflect on the existing conventions. Unravelling and questioning conventions is a guiding principle in the work of AMVK. Recurring themes are the relationship between humans and animals, between intelligence and intuition, between human creativity and artificial intelligence.

AMVK brings the most diverse elements into new units of meaning. She uses images from her personal life, images from her memory and images from our visual culture. She combines these with references to archetypal elements from numerical or colour symbolism and the world of the gods, but she also borrows aspects from the most recent scientific research, including artificial intelligence. From these very diverse elements AMVK creates her highly personal language, in which she combines the acquired knowledge about science with critical findings about gender roles and other power mechanisms in society.

AMVK mainly focuses on an exploration of the feminine in her work. Images and texts about women are the most prevalent in her work.

The female body is a constant. She herself puts it this way: "I use the female figure specifically as a metaphor for what the world does to the people, for our culture, for us." With her strong, confident woman images AMVK offers an alternative view to the traditional approach feminine, seductive nude. All the negative connotations associated with the female nude, be redirected towards their positive opposites.