Händelsehorisont / Event Horizon

Händelsehorisont / Event Horizon formed, alongside other important works in the Firestorm Foundation Collection like Imago (2024, oil on canvas, 205 x 205 cm) and Meander (2024, oil on canvas 90 x 270 cm), part of Martina Müntzing’s debut solo exhibition at CHART Art Fair in Copenhagen, 2024. In conjunction with the fair CFHILL gave the following interesting description of Händelsehorisont / Event Horizon:

The composition is a cohesive spiral form that was common during the Italian High Renaissance with its masterly depictions of the Virgin Mary, the Christ Child and the infant John the Baptist, or another beloved motif: Virgin and Child with Saint Anne. But in the perfectly balanced spiral composition before us, no biblical figures are recognizable, but instead we stand face to face with a magnificent stag. Its black-and-white gaze is directed straight at us with a concentration that almost feels humanly contact-seeking, even commanding. At the same time, the animal is depicted with scientific, almost dry, concentrated observation, as on a school board or an illustration in a fauna, where the entire animal with its biological forms and coat color is recorded in as much detail as possible. [...] Beneath the stag, the significantly smaller hind, the doe, is half-lying on the ground, and between the buck’s legs, another baby deer sticks its snout out. The calf seems to be sleeping. Here, in the lowest part of the picture plane, the scientific illusion is definitely broken. A boy in his lower teens lies straight, flat on the ground under the pyramid of animals. The head is turned out and up towards the viewer with an expression of low-key contempt. Everyone who has had a young adult in their immediate vicinity has been met by it. The Adidas jacket is as much his ‘fur’ as the golden speckled deer skin. The boy belongs to a species of his own. Beside the group, in the only hinted at background, a European goldfinch sits on a branch, a bird that in medieval times were seen as a symbol of Christ’s suffering. We are in the middle of a contemporary family drama, or ‘situation’ as a psychologist might have expressed it today. The story relates to a tradition, dating back long before Christian iconography, concerning itself with humanity’s strongest, and at the same time most fragile, bond: that between adults and children, children and their parents. A solid atom from the outside; inside a battle between, on the one hand, raging forces that want to stick together and, on the other, particles that want to break apart.

The aforementioned goldfinch, depicted in the composition, is a widespread and common seed-eating bird in Europe, North Africa, and western and central Asia. As a colourful species with a pleasant twittering song, and an associated belief that it brought health and good fortune, it used to be a popular pet that had been domesticated for at least 2,000 years. Pliny the Elder (AD 23/24 - 79) recorded that it could be taught to do tricks and in the 17th century it became fashionable to train goldfinches to draw water from a bowl with a miniature bucket on a chain. The Dutch title, Het puttertje, of Carel Fabritius’s (c. 1622 - 1654) painting The Goldfinch (1654, oil on canvas, 33.5 x 22.8 cm, Mauritshuis, The Hague, Netherlands) is based on the bird’s nickname (puttertje) which refers to this custom and is a diminutive equivalent to ‘draw-water’, an old Norfolk name for the bird. Worth pointing out in this specific context is also the fact that Donna Tartt’s (born 1963) famous novel The Goldfinch (awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction) was inspired by Fabritius’s painting (a turning point in the plot occurs when the narrator, Theo, sees his mother’s favourite painting, Het puttertje / The Goldfinch, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art).

The goldfinch frequently appears in paintings, not just for its colourful appearance but also for its symbolic meanings. Pliny the Elder associated the bird with fertility, and the presence of a giant goldfinch next to a naked couple in De tuin der lusten / The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490 - 1510, oil on oak panel, triptych, 205.5 x 384.9 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid) by the Dutch master Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450 - 1516) perhaps refers to this belief.

In Medieval Christianity, the goldfinch’s association with health symbolises the Redemption, and the birds habit of feeding on the seeds of spiky thistles (as in Müntzing’s composition where the goldfinch sits on an actual thistle), together with its red face, presaged the crucifixion of Jesus, where the bird supposedly became splattered with blood while attempting to remove the crown of thorns. Many of these devotional paintings were created in the middle of the fourteenth century while the Black Death pandemic gripped Europe. The symbolism persisted long after the Medieval times. A much later example of the goldfinch as a symbol of redemption is William Hogarth’s (1697 - 1764) painting The Graham Children (1742, oil on canvas, 160.5 x 181 cm, National Gallery, London). Thomas, the youngest of the depicted children, had died by the time the painting was completed.

Nearly 500 religious Renaissance paintings, mainly by Italian artists, show the bird, including Piero della Francesca’s (c. 1415 - 1492) The Nativity (1470 - 1475, oil, 124.4 x 122.6 cm, National Gallery, London) and Madonna del cardellino / Madonna of the Goldfinch (oil on wood, 107 x 77 cm, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence), painted by Raphael (1483 - 1520) in about 1505 – 1506, in which John the Baptist offers a European goldfinch to Christ in a warning of his future. In this painting, as in most of the Madonnas of his Florentine period, Raphael arranged the three figures - Mary, Christ and the young John the Baptist - to fit into a geometrical design, the same way Müntzing did with her characters in Händelsehorisont / Event Horizon 520 years later. Though the positions of the three bodies are natural, together they form an almost regular triangle.

In Federico Barocci’s (c. 1535 - 1612) Holy Family, a European goldfinch is held in the hand of John the Baptist, keeping it out of reach from an interested cat. In Cima da Conegliano’s (c. 1459 - c. 1517) Madonna and Child, a European goldfinch flutters in the hand of the Christ child. The bird is also an emblem of endurance and persistence. Because it symbolizes the Passion, the European goldfinch is considered a ‘saviour’ bird and may be pictured with the common housefly (which represents sin and disease).

The European goldfinch is also associated with Saint Jerome (Latin: Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus; Ancient Greek: Εὐσέβιος Σωφρόνιος Ἱερώνυμος; c. 342/347 - 420, otherwise known as Jerome of Stridon, an early Christian priest, confessor, theologian, translator and historian, best known for his translation of the Bible into Latin, the translation that became known as the Vulgate, and his commentaries on the whole Bible) and appears in some depictions of him, like Albrecht Dürer’s(1471 - 1528) Saint Jerome (c. 1496, oil on wood, 23.1 x 17.4 cm, National Gallery, London). The European goldfinch, when appearing in pictures of the Madonna and Christ child, mainly however represents the foreknowledge Jesus and Mary had of the Crucifixion whilst also serving as a symbol of suffering and redemption, themes alluded to in Müntzing’s Händelsehorisont / Event Horizon.

Provenance

CFHILL, CHART, Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, 29 August – 1 September 2024.

Firestorm Foundation (acquired at the above).

Exhibitions

Hedvig Eleonora Church, Stockholm, Tillblivelser, 28 November 2024 – 12 January 2025.

Copyright Firestorm Foundation