Bomslachtoffer

The Dutch city of Enschede had many victims among its population in WWII. After the war, the city asked Mari Andriessen to create a memorial monument. The artist designed five sculptures that symbolize the victims of war: three prisoners in a concentration camp, a prisoner of war, three resistance fighters, a Jewish woman with a child, and a woman with a bomb victim. The artwork in Middelheim Museum is the second version of the sculpture “Bomb Victim.”

What makes us “human”? In the search for answers to that question, artists have also depicted all the great human emotions, such as the suffering expressed in this work. By making art about them, we can also study these feelings and give them a place.

Early in his career, Dutch sculptor Mari Andriessen mainly received monumental commissions from the Catholic Church. From the second half of the 1930s, his work became freer and more spatial, and portraits occupied a more important place in his oeuvre. After WWII, he made several war memorials. Andriessen garnered appreciation for the sober way he expressed the character of his figures.