“La Grande Madre”
Fondazione Nicola Trussardi
In 1994 the Dutch artist Rineke Dijkstra began taking starkly minimal photographs of mothers, nude or barely clothed, cradling their newborns, some just a few hours old. The pictures, which constitute the series “New Mothers,” are illustrative of the extent to which Dijkstra limits the contextual information provided by her portraits to foreground her meticulous rendering of her subjects. And yet each of the snapshots in the series begs for an empathic response from the viewer. These women visibly bear the physical and emotional scars of the biological explosion that produces a new human being;