Motherhood and the Beast Within

Few images in the history of art have undergone a process of idealization as extensive as the image of motherhood.

From ancient representations to Renaissance depictions of the Madonna and Child, from Gustav Klimt’s The Three Ages of Woman to Nicolae Tonitza’s Motherhood, motherhood has crystallized in the collective imagination as a space of protection, unconditional love and tenderness.

A perfect harmony between the maternal body and the fragile body of the child has become firmly established in our cultural imagination.

But what happens to everything that is lived but cannot be contained within this perfect image?

Elleny Gherghe’s exhibition Motherhood and the Beast Within marks a turning point in the representation of motherhood in the history of art. The exhibition does not approach motherhood from the outside, from the perspective of external observers, but from within the lived experience of the woman who becomes a mother — a woman who experiences intense emotions, sometimes even contradictory to the culturally constructed ideal of the mother.

From the very title of the exhibition, the artist approaches this reality courageously by bringing together two seemingly incompatible terms: motherhood and the beast.

The first evokes care and tenderness; the second, instinct, wildness and the impossibility of maintaining self-control when the protection of one’s child is at stake.

Motherhood is no longer only about mother and child. It is about what a woman becomes when she becomes a mother.

By addressing this culturally sensitive subject and taking a clear position, Elleny’s painting enters a broader conversation about the representation of motherhood.

On the one hand, the exhibition can be read through a hermeneutic lens that places Elleny among contemporary women artists who courageously deconstruct the metanarrative of idyllic motherhood, alongside Louise Bourgeois, Carrie Mae Weems and Judy Chicago.

Louise Bourgeois’s Spider, for example, offers a direct correspondence with the image of the beast: a gigantic arachnid that instinctively protects its offspring, unleashing everything wild and visceral within the mother.

Within this framework, the animal imagery in Elleny’s artistic universe does not animalize women in order to distance them from the human. Instead, it retrieves a dimension that cultural representations of femininity and motherhood have often attempted to discipline: instinct.