Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven (also known as AMVK) is an artist of singular complexity. Born in 1951 in Antwerp, where she still lives and works, she has been active since the 1970s as a visual artist, graphic designer and performer. She has always been a pioneer. She should, first and foremost, be considered an artist for the future. AMVK’s practice is truly interdisciplinary.

M HKA wants to introduce Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven to a wider audience as an innovator of forms and interpreter of moods - as oxygen of the whole society.

Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven / AMVK

(c)image: M HKA, 2019 - Courtesy of the Artist and Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp
A Dash of Dolls, 2019
Print , 123.5 x 500 cm
digital print on Forex

Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven has created a vast body of critical work in which she focusses on the popular or media image, typically of women. One long-term project has been her series of Women portrait drawings, that have occupied many sketchbooks. The drawings, based on imagery with young women from such sources as pin-up magazines, are often juxtaposed with the quotes of philosophers. This particular set of drawings, named A Dash of Dolls after the soft-porn magazine that was in this case the source material, includes a quote and lists of keywords from Anatomie d’une destructivité humaine (Anatomy of Human Destructiveness) by Erich Fromm. An array of words, completed with the model’s own name, is put alongside each figure, as if she is speaking them. Fromm’s words, which describe human aggression as a part of the human condition for expressing unhappiness, provide these images with a radical desire to attack back from a position of subordination.