Ruben B.
Google
Together with my youngest daughter, I visited the Constantin Brancusi exhibition — a sculptor who managed to give silence a shape. His work seems to breathe somewhere between heaven and earth, between stone and soul. Yet within that stillness lies tension: between admiration and discomfort, between form and history.
For her, it was the first encounter with an artist who dared to mold silence. For me, it became an unexpected reunion — not with a person, but with my own work.
Years ago, I created an artwork called “Geborgrouw” (“Sheltered Grief”): a smooth stone in which one places their hands to remember someone who has passed away. The gesture is simple and ritualistic — reminiscent of the Japanese mourning practice mizuko kuyō, where stones or small figures are dedicated to the deceased as acts of remembrance and connection.
At the time, I didn’t know Brancusi. Only later did a sculpture teacher tell me that my stone evoked his Sleeping Muse — that same quiet tension between life and death, memory and forgetting.
Standing among Brancusi’s works, I felt that recognition return — as if his art had become an anchor for my own search for solace in loss.
Yet the exhibition also challenged me. The label accompanying “La N Blonde II”* explicitly noted that the original title used a “discriminatory, outdated term.” This curatorial choice reframed Brancusi’s legacy, acknowledging how beauty can emerge from systems that also exclude.
It wasn’t about condemning the artist, but about expanding the conversation — asking who is rendered visible through art, and who remains unseen.
The references to De Stijl (1918) and to Brancusi’s idea of the Axis Mundi — the invisible axis between earth and sky — gained new resonance for me.
Perhaps that axis is not only a spiritual line upwards, but also an invitation to reflect: to pause and consider whom we choose to elevate, and why.
At the end of our visit, my daughter carefully selected a few Brancusi magnets — miniature echoes of his timeless forms. Watching her choose them with such joy and precision felt like a small continuation of his spirit: that same curiosity, that same gentle touch between matter and meaning.
