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- Silvia B. - OF BEAUTY AND DOUBT
Silvia B.
OF BEAUTY AND DOUBT
Beauty and Doubt
Beauty and doubt run like a thread through the oeuvre of Silvia B. Her sculptures of hybrid creatures often exert an immediate, powerful attraction on the viewer. But their seductive appearance soon reveals its ambiguity. Alongside beauty, imperfection, estrangement, and unease begin to surface. Our carefully constructed image of the world starts to waver, and doubt sets in. In her work, Silvia B. continuously seeks out this grey area where nothing is quite what it seems—because, as she puts it, “the moment you begin to doubt something, true thinking begins.”
Contrasts
Silvia B. is fascinated not only by beauty and the sublime, but equally by the allure of the abnormal, our relationship with animals, and our own animalistic nature. The tension between aesthetics and ethics—evident, for example, in her collection of animal curiosities—also plays a significant role in her work. Silvia B. does not wish to take or impose a stance, but rather to provoke thought. Her work deliberately merges opposites—beauty and ugliness, innocence and sin, the familiar and the strange—in ways that are both unsettling and seductive.
First Monograph
Coinciding with the retrospective exhibition at Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Silvia B.’s first full monograph is being published. Designed by the artist herself, the book offers an overview of her sculptures, drawings, photographs, and installations from the past 25 years. A special edition of the book—limited to 50 copies—will also be released. It features a handmade skin-toned leather cover with blind embossing, surgical stitching, a branding mark, and a ribbon made of real hair.
The book (€49.00) will be available in the museum shop from mid-November. The special edition (€175.00) from December.
About Silvia B.
Silvia B. lives and works in Rotterdam. She studied sculpture and fashion at the Willem de Kooning Academy in the same city. In recent years, she has had solo exhibitions at Museum Beelden aan Zee and GEM in The Hague. She has also frequently taken on the role of curator, including for Bloedmooi (Bloody Beautiful), an exhibition exploring the relationship between humans and animals at the Rotterdam Museum.
