The Mother (The Bobby in Me)

In 1899, Arletta Jacobs wrote the book De vrouw. Haar bouw en haar inwendige organen (The Woman. Her Structure and Internal Organs). With fold-out plates drawn by Jacobs herself, the book describes the female body in detail, including the reproductive system. Its primary goal was to explain how reproductive organs function to the growing number of women who no longer wanted their own sexuality to feel mysterious.

She studied the various stages of the pregnant body, partly through paper sculptures of wombs containing progressively larger fetuses. These were made by the groundbreaking company Auzoux, to scale and carefully painted. At the Venice Biennale in 2022, these paper wombs were exhibited alongside Jacobs’s fold-out plates, among contemporary artworks. Jacobs’s persistent spirit in her political and scientific struggle deserved recognition.

Where the 2022 presentation centered on the pregnant womb, Vera Gulikers, in her recent 2024 sculpture The Mother (The Bobby in Me), focuses on life after birth. At Villa, we see a figure with rollercoaster-like legs transformed into a bow, from which hangs a large pacifier with a baby’s head attached. The work embodies the physical transition from one body to two. According to Vera, this is a profound change, inherently connected to the process of letting go. At the same time, she experiences motherhood as a gift that keeps unfolding. In the sculpture, the faces of mother and daughter are close together; they meet each other’s gaze, yet there is literally a space between them. In this way, the layered emotions surrounding motherhood take on a physical form. In a video fragment from Museum Beelden Aan Zee, she explains that she also wanted to create this work to place the mother figure on a stage, thereby raising broader questions about how we view the role of motherhood.

Girls and women

In all her paintings and sculptures, Vera seeks out the girlish and the feminine in art. She does this, for example, by playing with paintings that at first glance resemble abstract expressionist works like those of Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning—macho artists who entered the canon like rock stars. In these abstract paintings, she incorporates subtle colored lines drawn from works by female artists from art history. So if you look closely, you see not an abstract expressionist painting, but figures celebrating women’s contributions to art history. It looks abstract, but it is essentially very figurative. Vera finds this reversal interesting. From an abstract visual language, the viewer encounters figuration, and in her work the opposite also happens. Her figurative sculptures originate from the idea of solidified paint. In an interview with Brigitte Bloksma, she says:

"I’ve been painting grid canvases for several years, always including a doodle inspired by a work by a forgotten or overlooked female artist from art history. At some point, I wanted to be able to walk around that doodle, to experience it from different brushstrokes, in space. I see my sculptures as paintings, as an extension, a kind of solidified paint. Even if practically it is very different to make. When you paint a lot, you almost feel like becoming a brushstroke yourself, like a self-portrait."

Her play with clichéd images of femininity also appears in her choice of materials, such as embroidery grids as painting surfaces and the use of a cleaning cloth as a brush. In the Poetsdoeken (Cleaning Cloths, 2017–2018) series, she blurs the boundary between art and domesticity. For these paintings, she used Vanish Oxi Action and other everyday cleaning products to rub away layers of egg tempera. In doing so, she shows that cleaning and painting not only share physical similarities but can essentially be the same act.

Use of color

Vera’s sculptures invite you to touch and even “taste” them visually, thanks in part to their swirling forms and pastel tones. She explains:

"Using pastel colors is a typical example of my approach: I experiment and only stop when I recognize myself somewhere in it. At the academy, I worked a lot with plaster and wanted to make some brightly colored sculptures. But during the process, the colors dried lighter and lighter, ending up as pastels. I liked it. The attraction of the colors draws the viewer toward the references underneath."

That is important to Vera—she wants to attract the viewer to then access a deeper layer. "I want to create something that immediately appeals to the viewer, but also contains a deeper layer. The colors and forms first grab attention, but a second look reveals more beneath the surface."

In an interview with Persis Bekkering for Mister Motley, she was asked whether her use of color also appropriates values like sweet, cute, or girly. She admits that it does, but also as an ironic commentary. She wants to play with the girly cliché and challenge stereotypes. "But I also really love the colors. Is that a social construct, something I grew up with? Is it because I am a woman? I explore that. A male teacher at the academy was completely disgusted. He said, ‘It leaves a bad taste in my mouth; can’t you stop?’ Such an extreme reaction interested me. I realized those colors could be a form of protest."

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=154&v=sjqTNHRZGTg&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.de-lage-landen.com%2F&source_ve_path=MzY4NDIsMzY4NDIsMzY4NDIsMzY4NDIsMjg2NjY

[2] https://www.beeldenaanzee.nl/files/documenten/260924_bijlage_nrc_sk_04-05.pdf

[3] https://schunck.nl/museum/nieuws-en-verhalen/kennismaken-met-vera-gulikers

[4] Idem

[5] https://www.mistermotley.nl/de-meest-onbevangen-schilderstreek-een-interview-met-vera-gulikers/