Upcoming: Petra Boshart

Solo exhibition

In Villa Hinkeloord you can admire Petra Boshart's solo exhibition from June 16 to January 26, 2025. Petra Boshart comes from a family of stonemasons and is an old acquaintance of ours. She shows a lot of new work at this exhibition. A new monograph will be published at the exhibition, 'Petra Boshart Death and Life'.

Stones live for Petra Boshart. From an early age, to this day, life has been her all-encompassing theme. 'Aarde (Earth)' was her first large sculpture. She was and is curious about what drives people, with interests in myths, history and other cultures. The preference for circles, large robust, earthy shapes is clear. The flattened design also returns, such as in 'Vrouw in Zand (Woman in Sand)' and 'Zwarte Tors (Black Torso)'.

From the start, Boshart developed her own formal language, usually derived from figuration. This is clearly visible in an early work 'Marktvrouw II (Market Woman II)' from 1986. She herself considers this one of her best works.

How life originated is a question to which she continues to try to find an answer to this day. The connection between the origins of the first cells, water and water creatures are questions that keep occupying her. By becoming acquainted with cultures that were new to her, she abandoned her figurative formal language in the late 1980s and developed her own idiom in which she managed to unite emotions such as love, strength and sexuality. An example of this is the sculpture 'The great marriage' (1987).

Her child Nick's birth spawned a series of sculptures related to motherhood and feeding her son: 'Mamantar' (1999), 'Mamatoto' (2000) and the sculpture 'Land van Melk en Honing (Land of Milk and Honey)' (2000).

In recent years she has shifted the focus of her work to marine animals and single-celled life forms associated with water and marine life. Evolution plays an important role in this. The images were created by a cross-pollination of two themes that run like a common thread through her oeuvre: the fascination with the origins of life and the theme of currents or 'panta rhei'. This theme has played an important role since her childhood.