Galerie C, Neuchâtel, Switzerland: Elle emporte ma vie avec elle
17.09-24.10.26
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The Way Home
Water-mixable oil on canvas
400 x 300 mm
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Where do we meet now?
Water-mixable oil on canvas
450 x 550 mm
The mother occupies a special place in the history of art. As the cradle of civilisation and a symbol of fertility and transmission, she is omnipresent in artistic representations, from the Neolithic sculptures of voluptuous women discovered notably in Malta, right through to the entire history of Western Judeo-Christian art. In this tradition, the mother is successively portrayed as a goddess, an empress, the Mother of Rome, and then the Virgin—the holy mother, a symbol of purity and spiritual motherhood—inspiring some of the greatest painters and sculptors, from Michelangelo to Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci. Royal and dynastic portraits, for their part, affirm the lineage and political role of these mothers, notably in the works of Liotard and Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun. With the Revolution, the mother also became a political allegory, as seen in the works of Delacroix and Daumier. Yet, for centuries, the mother was primarily depicted from an external perspective, and often by men. Virgin, saint, queen, ideal mother, sacred or reprehensible figure: she seems assigned to specific roles. In the 20th century, women artists began to shift this perspective towards the lived experience of motherhood, its ambivalences, anxieties and constraints. Louise Bourgeois and Niki de Saint Phalle thus explored the complex links between motherhood, fear and patriarchal taboos; more recently, Annette Messager, Fatima Mazmouz and Laetitia Ky have, in turn, questioned representations of the female body, pregnancy, false pregnancies and abortion. Motherhood thus becomes a space for political reflection on the body, reproductive rights, justice, violence and the inequalities associated with parenthood.
This casts a new light not only on motherhood itself, but also on its representation in the history of art. And perhaps there remains a dimension to this experience that still eludes the image: that which precedes our own memory.
Our earliest memories are not the very first moments of our lives. They come much later. Before them lie whole years of which we know almost nothing. This memory has not vanished. It exists elsewhere. It belongs to the one who saw us being born, smiling, walking, speaking. To the one who bore witness to our first movements, our first fears, our first impulses. Whether biological mother, adoptive mother, stepmother or any of the women who have filled that role, they are often the sole custodians of this part of our history: that life is carried away by the one who raised us.
Just as our memory begins too late, the visitor’s gaze always arrives after the act of creation. The hesitations The hesitations, the intuitions, the abandoned gestures, the doubts, and the experiments that shaped the work remain invisible. We therefore encounter a work of art in the same way that we encounter our own existence: in the midst of its story. The beginning has already passed. The exhibition thus becomes a space for transmission. The works do not seek to depict motherhood in an illustrative manner, but to make perceptible that which usually remains invisible: memories carried by others, acts of care, legacies, bodies that bear the marks of time.
As we move through these works, the mother thus appears less as a singular or ideal figure than as a repository of memory, transmission, care, conflict, desire and transformation. She carries within her that which we have lost track of. By inviting the public to encounter these multiple maternal figures, the exhibition explores what is passed on from one body to another, from one generation to the next, but also what remains unspoken, invisible or impossible to recreate.
Perhaps, then, looking at these works amounts to searching, within the memories of others, for the fragments of a beginning that eludes us – and to recognising that our history never quite belongs to us.
