Leonhard Hurzlmeier | Women at the Well

Vigo Gallery is delighted to present Leonhard Hurzlmeier's masterpiece, Women at the Well, painted from 2015 - 2018 and shown in the UK for the first time. Concurrently, we will present the artist's second solo exhibition with the gallery, Edenism at Wellington Arch.

The image Frauen am Brunnen draws on the famous composition of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper and loosely references the Classical iconography of water nymphs as well as the Christian iconography of women at the tomb and Rebecca at the well.

Thirteen women are depicted gathered around a hexagonal well filled with red liquid, in an interior that opens onto the sky through a three-part arcade. At the center of the image, a blonde and a black-haired woman kiss or embrace. The six or rather five women left and right of the pair are closely connected to the center of the image by means of composition. Two long, diagonal axes bind the figures together in the form of an “X,” and the colors and circular forms of the heads are symmetrically distributed along the axes. The figures on the left have corresponding figures on the right and vice versa. In the foreground on the left, we see a young woman with a wound or menstrual blood on her leg. She is embraced from behind by a blonde woman who touches her chest and thigh. On the right, a pregnant woman is also approached from behind by a dark-haired woman on all fours. The scene is presided over by a kind of guardian on either side. The guardian to the left stands to one side, pointing with a stick in a decisive, commanding gesture, while the guardian to the right raises her arms behind her head. Both gestures indicate decision and resolve.

The guardians are also distinctly excluded from the group of figures—mostly seated at an image level in the foreground—leading back to the arcades in a step-like zone kissing or embracing women. These women are presented as opposites by traditional means: while the women of the left are dressed in the blue and white colors of the Virgin Mary, the women on the right are dressed in a bright red dress. It recalls Nazarene representations of the Shulamite and Mary, or more specifically Friedrich Overbeck’s image Italia und Germania. More than anything, though, it recalls the opposition of the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene, and perhaps also the opposition of Mary and Martha, still evident in Gustave Courbet’s The Wheat Sifters and Jean-Luc Godard’s Je vous salue, Marie. In France, the painting is known as La Maman et la Putain, and has featured in several films and novels.

In this sense, the left side of the image could be seen as the independent women’s side, and the right side as that of the mothers. The two Marys, however, lead opposite movements in a chiasmic reversal of roles. The kiss itself could refer to the close relationship of Jesus Christ and John in the context of The Last Supper, but also to the traitorous Judas. The gesture remains ambivalent. It is more about representing opposites that are overturned—temporarily at least—by physical closeness.

An alliance, a union of disciples or revolutionaries that cross the boundaries of their camps and join forces. The image is not only that of a group, however; it also draws on the Christian principle of the Last Supper as well as on the Classical iconography of water nymphs, which found their way into modern painting by way of the Renaissance and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.

In the Christian commemoration of the Last Supper, bread is transformed into the body and wine into blood of Christ, promising eternal life, while the water nymphs of antiquity are associated with fertility and renewal. Water, wine and fire are the elements with which Joseph Beuys filled vessels for the Fondo per l’Azione Contro le Calamità Naturali, the Chalice of Humankind, and which he imbued with healing and redemptive properties. Unlike in Beuys’s work, however, in the opposite process in the Frauen am Brunnen, fire and liquid are poured out, lost.