The entrance to the Rijksmuseum’s latest exhibition, *Metamorphoses*, offers a visceral introduction to the volatility of creation. Louis Finson’s 1611 painting, “The Four Elements,” greets visitors with a tangle of naked bodies in centripetal motion—a scene of muscular tension and distress that serves as a prelude to the exhibition’s deeper inquiry. It is an image of disorder rendered with exquisite precision, capturing the inherent violence in the myths that underpin Western art.
Named after Ovid’s epic poem, the exhibition functions as a temporal bridge, linking Renaissance masterpieces with antiquity and modern sculpture. While "blockbuster" shows often risk becoming mere inventories of famous names, curators here use Ovid’s text as a rigorous point of departure. The show tracks the evolution of themes like desire and "becoming," placing artists as disparate as Antonio da Correggio and Isamu Noguchi in a shared conversation about the fluidity of the human form.
By focusing on the act of transformation rather than just the aesthetic of the myth, the Rijksmuseum avoids the trap of a substanceless retrospective. Instead, the curation highlights how the Ovidian tradition has allowed artists across centuries to navigate the dissonance between beauty and brutality. Whether through Jean-Léon Gérôme’s late-19th-century "Pygmalion and Galatea" or more contemporary works, the exhibition argues that our fascination with change—and the often-violent impulses that drive it—remains a fundamental constant in the history of making.
With reporting from Hyperallergic.
Source · Hyperallergic
