Attila Adorján „Red Marchers on the Catwalk”, 180×200 cm, olej na płótnie, 2017. Ari Kupsus Gallery (Art Market Budapest). Budapeszt 2017

 

Mary Beth Edelson „Some Living American Women Artists / Last Supper”, akwarela na druku offsetowym, 1972. Wystawa: „Woman. Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s”, Muzeum Sztuki Współczesnej (MUMOK), Wiedeń 2017

 

Markus Proschek „House of Art – The Judgment”, olej na płótnie, 2006. Wystawa „Noul romantism negru / New Black Romanticism”, The National Museum of Art of Romania. Bukareszt 2017

 

Ulrike Rosenbach „Female Energy Exchange, Venus, Medusa, Supergirl”, fotografia na papierze, 1975/76. Wystawa: „Woman. Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s”, Muzeum Sztuki Współczesnej (MUMOK), Wiedeń 2017

 

“Besides the rescue myths and dragon-slaying myths there are others in which the hero kills the monster with the assistance of a friendly female figure. In this series the woman — Medea, Ariadne, Athene, for example — is actively hostile to the dragon of the devouring mother archetype. These myths show us the helpful, sisterly side of woman, standing shoulder to shoulder with the hero as his beloved, helpmate, and companion, or as the Eternal Feminine who leads him to redemption. Fairy tales lay particular stress on the sisterliness of these figures who succor the hero in his peril, touchingly ready to sacrifice themselves and to love him with their purely human love whose very differences complement his own.

Once the anima-sister side has been experienced through the rescue of the captive, the man-woman relationship can develop over the whole field of human culture. The freed captive is not merely a symbol of man’s erotic relations in the narrow sense. The task of the hero is to free, through her, the living relation to the ‚you’, to the world at large.

This inner receptive side is, on the subjective level, the rescued captive, the virgin mother who conceives by the holy wind-ghost and who is at once man’s inspiration, his beloved and mother, the enchantress and prophetess, just as the hero is her lover and father.

The Great Mother—in other words, the predominance of the collective unconscious—causes a flood of unconscious material to irrupt into the personality, sweeping it along and sometimes even annihilating it like an elemental force. But the fruitfulness of the hero who gains the captive is a human and cultural fruitfulness. From the union of the hero’s ego with the creative side of the soul, when he ‚knows’, and realizes both the world and the anima, there is begotten the true birth, the synthesis of both.

The symbolic marriage of ego-hero and anima, as well as being the precondition of fertility, offers a firm foundation on which the personality can stand and fight the dragon, whether this be the dragon of the world or of the unconscious”.

Erich Neumann The Origins and History of Consciousness, 1970