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Aquarium - Traum von diversen Leben |
Description of the painting
The painting depicts a world divided into two parts, as one might find in an aquarium. The pictorial space is divided into two areas by an almost horizontal line: above, a bright, clear blue sky stretches out – it is the same air that surrounds the viewers – and below lies the dark green of the water. This unusually sharp division gives the scene a theatrical quality. The figures seem to move in both worlds.
Two female hybrid creatures dominate the right half of the image. Both the left and right figure consist of the upper body of a naked adult woman. The one on the left has the lower body of a seal, which is bent horizontally, while the one on the right has that of a polar bear, floating vertically in the water. The seal woman has rested her right arm on the edge of the glass wall; with the index finger and thumb of her left hand, she touches the right nipple of the polar bear woman – a striking and by no means accidental gesture that alludes to a famous painting from the Fontainebleau School. The female polar bear has a nursing baby latched onto her left breast which has a fish tail below its navel. The protagonists wear objects on their heads that can be interpreted as swim caps or wigs. Since the human halves of the figures are shifted entirely to the right half of the image, there is room on the left for a pink swan landing with its wings spread wide. Below the seal’s hindquarters, which are bent to the left, a large shark swims through the dark water. Its body is rendered in bold shades of blue, turquoise, and violet. Despite its size and the generally threatening connotations associated with sharks, it does not appear aggressive. It attacks no one and seems just as naturally at home in this world as the swan.
This hybrid world, composed of three different hybrid creatures, forms a harmonious whole together with the swan and the shark. None of the protagonists are depicted in a naturalistic style. Rather, they are stylized and, through the bold color palette and their unusual “hairstyles,” clearly shifted into the realm of the fantastical and artificial.
The color palette of the entire painting is intense and luminous. Turquoise, blue, green, yellow, pink, and violet dominate the picture plane. The cheerful, almost fairy-tale-like color scheme stands in striking contrast to the art-historical and social meanings hidden within the depicted motifs.
At first glance, the painting might appear to be a surrealist fantasy scene: mermaids with their young, a swan, and a shark living together in a fairy-tale world. Upon closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that Alexandra Weidmann draws on several motifs and visual conventions from European art history and fundamentally alters their meanings. This is precisely what makes the painting so distinctive: the historical visual references remain recognizable, but their original semantics are subverted and reorganized. This is particularly evident in the unusual gesture of the woman on the left, who is reaching for the nipple of the woman on the right.
The gesture directly references the famous painting *Gabrielle d’Estrées and One of Her Sisters*, created around 1594 by an anonymous artist of the Fontainebleau School and now housed in the Louvre. The painting depicts the bare upper bodies of two women in a bath tub, of which only a small portion of the upper rim is visible; the woman on the left is reaching with two fingers toward the nipple of the woman on the right. The Louvre cautiously identifies the subjects as Gabrielle d’Estrées and the Duchess of Villars, or the Maréchale de Ballagny.
It is precisely this unusual gesture that has given rise to numerous interpretations. It is often understood as a reference to Gabrielle’s pregnancy or the birth of a child. The Louvre explicitly mentions a possible connection to breast milk and a recent birth; other elements of the painting, particularly the ring held by Gabrielle, have also been interpreted in connection with her relationship to Henry IV.
Alexandra Weidmann adopts this gesture and makes it a central focal point of her own painting. Yet she radically alters its contextual meaning.
In the Fontainebleau painting, female physicality is embedded in a courtly world of sexuality, pregnancy, romantic relationships, and dynastic reproduction – and is thus ultimately tied to a genealogical order determined by a man. The Louvre generally interprets the numerous known variations of the composition as allegories of the birth of a natural child of Henry IV.
In Alexandra Weidmann’s work, this male reference disappears entirely. In its place is a relationship between female hybrid beings. One touches the other’s body while the latter is nursing a child. Female reproduction within a male-determined order gives way to female community and peaceful coexistence with other creatures whose gender remains undefined. The semantics of the gesture are thus not merely altered but virtually reversed.
The mermaid – or siren – also has a long and contradictory iconographic tradition. In European art history, she has come to symbolize seduction, sexuality, danger, and the power of the female body. The woman as a sea creature often embodied the foreign and the seductive and was thus closely linked to male notions of female sexuality.
In Alexandra Weidmann’s work, little of this remains. Her mermaids seduce no one – at most, they seduce one another. They are neither dangerous sirens nor erotic beings. They are mothers, companions, and inhabitants of a world of their own. The female bodies are thus detached from a traditional male context of meaning. They are no longer objects of male desire but act independently and form relationships with one another. Nudity, too, takes on a different meaning as a result. It is not primarily erotic. Rather, the bodies appear as natural, almost elemental forms of existence.
The historical visual concept of reproduction is thus transformed into a notion of care and female solidarity. Here, a connection can be drawn to a central theme in feminist art history: the visibility of care work and the question of how motherhood, nursing, and physical care are culturally represented and socially valued. Alexandra Weidmann is not interested in an idealized portrayal of the mother. Rather, she makes the relationships between bodies visible. Touch, care, and closeness become independent elements of the image.
The painting thus fits into those groups of works in which the artist takes up traditional notions of female roles and physicality in order to subsequently rearrange them semantically.
Through its connection to the Fontainebleau quotation, the inserted child takes on a different meaning here as well. It does not simply represent motherhood in the biological sense. It is situated within a relationship between two women whose bodies are connected through the touch of the nipple. This creates an almost closed cycle. However, because the child differs from its mothers, it also becomes a protagonist in its own right.
The presence of the swan is particularly multifaceted. In European art history, the swan carries strong erotic and mythological connotations. Above all, it evokes the story of Leda and Zeus: Zeus appears to Leda in the form of a swan, thereby making the swan the embodiment of a tale of divine desire, sexual power, and male seduction.
Here, too, however, Alexandra Weidmann takes only the familiar symbol and strips it of its traditional meaning. Although the swan appears in her painting, there is no male god whose attention a woman is seeking, and no sexual encounter is depicted. The swan is simply an animal flying through the same world in which the mermaids exist.
In this way, this traditional motif is also demythologized. The former symbol of male power and erotic desire becomes an inhabitant of a world in which the male center of the old narrative no longer exists.
Another reversal can be found in the large shark at the bottom of the image. The shark is one of those animals that, in the modern collective imagination, are particularly strongly associated with danger and threat. In a traditional image, its presence near naked people would immediately create tension. Here, the opposite happens. The shark does not attack anyone. It swims calmly through the water, thereby becoming a perfectly ordinary inhabitant of this world. As a result, even what is supposedly threatening loses its traditional function. Just as the mermaid is no longer the dangerous siren and the swan is no longer the embodiment of a male myth, the shark, too, does not become a monster. All living creatures coexist peacefully side by side.
This reveals another essential aspect of the image: the dissolution of the boundary between humans, animals, and mythical creatures.
The women and the infant have human upper bodies and animal lower bodies. The swan moves through the air above them, the shark through the water below them. There is nothing to suggest that any of these life forms is fundamentally considered superior or inferior. The traditional hierarchy of human – animal – nature – myth is overturned. The hybrid is no longer an exception or a monster. It becomes the norm of another world.
Herein lies a connection to posthumanist questions that challenge the supposedly self-evident primacy of humans and the sharp separation between nature and culture. In Alexandra Weidmann’s work, however, this does not take place in a theoretical or didactic form, but rather through a visual world that is both poetic and unsettling.
he various motifs in the image can therefore be understood as parts of a common strategy.
The mermaid loses her traditional role as a seductress. The swan loses its function as a symbol of male desire. Female nudity loses its function as an erotic object of the male gaze. The child is removed from a dynastic order and integrated into a feminine relationship. The shark loses its menacing nature. And the boundary between human and animal is dissolved. The image could therefore be understood as an iconography of reversal.
Alexandra Weidmann does not simply take historical motifs and re-illustrates them. She alters the relationships between the motifs and, in doing so, their meaning. The old iconography remains visible, but its semantic order is replaced.
That is precisely what makes the connection to Gabrielle d’Estrées and one of her sisters so important. The seemingly enigmatic touch of the breast is a specific historical reference. Yet while Renaissance art places female bodies within a context of sexuality, pregnancy, and dynastic reproduction, Alexandra Weidmann creates a world that does not require a male protagonist. Here, the woman is no longer the object of a narrative determined by a man.
In this way, old motifs give rise to an entirely new semantics: a poetic, hybrid world in which female physicality, motherhood, care, and community are no longer subject to traditional hierarchical orders. Humans and animals, myth and everyday life, the body and nature can coexist.
At first glance, the painting’s cheerful color palette distracts from the radical nature of this reordering. Yet it is precisely in its apparent lightness in which the painting’s strength lies: it does not tell a new story using old images – it transforms the meaning of the old images by placing them in a new world.