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.

AMVK

(c)image: AMVK
Die Loreley, 1987-1990
Series , dimensions variable
paint and plexi on aluminium

"The series Die Loreley consists of 54 portraits of acquaintances, friends and family members who spontaneously visited me during the period 1987–1990. I let chance decide, and only asked them to come back once again to give me two hours of their time. That was the average time I needed to paint the portrait, in two 45-minute sessions. The natural light in my studio was also limited.

I prepared the paint for one Plexiglas support per person. I started with the white of the eyes, around which I formed the rest of the face. During the sitting, people had to look me straight in the eye. In chronological order, in the order in which they visited me, I gave each model a line from the poem Die Loreley. There are nine people per stanza, and the poem has six stanzas.

The intention was to link a high-quality photo print of each portrait to the specific words. In this project, the portraits are only the first step to the final work. The second phase was stopped at a certain moment because it took too long to collect enough portraits. The poem Heinrich Heine wrote in the nineteenth century is about melancholy and inevitability – destiny in its most fatal form."

− AMVK