Hands can be as expressive as faces, as articulate as language. They touch, grab, squeeze, slap, tickle, clasp, stroke, hold. They break things and mend things, they work and they play. In infancy, hands reach out to meet the forms of the world that haven’t yet been granted meaning as images or in words. What eyes can’t determine, hands investigate. Children grasp at the legs of furniture to orient themselves, they explore the shapes of toys, the textures of clothes. Their hands learn the weight and stability of things, making contact with what is ‘other’ to establish the borders of the self.
In the history of art, hands have of course played a significant role. The earliest known artworks are hand prints in caves – the traces of what we can only interpret as an existential impulse; a declaration of identity and the fleetingness of presence. In historical paintings, hands become vessels of symbolism. They hint at relationships, moods and hierarchies, religious symbolisms and ulterior motives.
“Why have my hands strayed to the brushes?” wrote Rainer Maria Rilke in The Book of Monastic Life (1899). The poem’s question is not about anatomy or orientation, but about the enigmatic direction and goal of the creative impulse. In many of the works in this exhibition, hands appear as metaphors for the straying and wandering of the unconscious mind. Disembodied arms reach out like probes, searching and sensing with mysterious intent. Hands form flickering houses and drooping bouquets, surreal puns and shadowy traces. In other works, hands are replaced by gloves – floppy effigies that, even when limp and empty, seem as if they could wriggle to life and crawl away. But there are decidedly human hands here too: curling protectively around loved ones, or dangling casually at the body’s side, they represent everyday care, intimacy and agency, a way of participating in the world.
Taken together, these images of hands could raise questions about the relationship between body and mind – a meeting point that is not always easy to locate. How does thought take form in the body? What does the body know that the mind can’t? These works suggest the hand as an interface between internal and external, translating intention into motion without always passing through conscious thought. As Rilke’s poem reminds us, action often begins not with certainty, but with a reach into the dark.
With works by Katherine Bradford, Valie Export, Anna Grath, Stefan Hirsig, Stephen Kent, Maximilian Kirmse, Aubrey Levinthal, Alex Müller, and Fabian Treiber.
