Good Mom/Bad Mom
Period: March 2025 – September 2025
Location: Centraal Museum, Utrecht
Good Mom/Bad Mom unravels the myth of the ‘good mother.’ Featuring classical, modern and contemporary art, this exhibition portrays motherhood as a complex and dynamic process. Through five different themes, the exhibition breaks the perspective of the individual mother-figure and makes space for collectivity, different forms of ‘mothering’ and political questions around self-determination.
Good Mom/Bad Mom – Natascha Libbert (Centraal Museum, Utrecht, 2025),
Mary: the Good Mother
The most famous mother in Western art history is the Christian Mary. She is usually depicted smiling serenely with baby Jesus on her lap or at the breast. ‘Mary with child’ is an archetypal Christian image that also appears in secular and modern works of art. Despite being perhaps the most unrealistic mother ever (as a virgin she gave birth to a god), Mary is seen as the ‘primal mother’. Her representation as a symbol of undivided care and self erasure has influenced how Western patriarchal society has institutionalized motherhood in the past centuries. Centraal Museum owns several such stereotypical images from across the ages, as evidenced by this selection. Most of the older artworks were produced by male painters.
The painting Madonna and Child by Artemisia Gentileschi (center) is an exception in this regard. In the early 17th century, she painted this intimate moment between mother and child. The mother is trying get her child to latch, her eyes are half-closed, as though Gentileschi wanted to capture the fatigue of early motherhood. Through a contemporary lens Gentileschi seems to tell us that breastfeeding is not a given.
Sogenannt Mutterlich (right) is one of Mirian Cahn’s many rewritings of the Madonna and Child figuration. Here, the normalized and nameless isolation and desolation of motherhood as an institution is brought to the fore. While the composition appears familiar to us, the intense use of form and colour inescapably forces the viewer to reflect. What is going on here? The hollow eyes, so characteristic of Cahn’s work, the pale breasts, and the red lips of mother and child transform the imposed idyll into the grotesque. Yet, simultaneously, it is an image in which the intimate connection between mother and child remains intact. Cahn creates a space, a world of images in which the two concepts of motherhood, as an institution and as an experience, intersect. Tenderness meets terror.
In Tala Madani’s series of paintings and animations entitled Shit Mom, we see a mother figure made of brown goo. Everything she touches becomes smeared with the same brown gunk. With her humurous, expressive appraoch, Madani dirsupts the romantic image of the mother as nurturing and self sacrificing. Instead, she explores themes of guilt, faillure and uncontrolled impulses, which are often let out in art and the media. The mother has to meet so many demands that she can really only fail. In doing so she is condemned by society as a ‘shit mom’.
Aline Thomassen plays with iconic depictions of mother and child, such as the Madonna and the Pieta. On this woman’s lap lies her six year old daughter. From the girls’s spine, painted like a braid,thin grey lines emerge refering to years. Each year marks important moments of upheaval, joy and pain for generations of women within Thomassen’s family. Her daughter carries all these stories within her.
Image 1: Tala Madani. Shit Mom (Quads), 2019. Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery/foto Flying Studio Collectie Defares,
Image 2: Aline Thomassen, Without title, 2014, private collection,
Good Mom/Bad Mom – Natascha Libbert (Centraal Museum, Utrecht, 2025).
Front: Buhlebezwe Siwani, Zanobungcwele, 2022, soap, styrofoam, 160.5 x 53.1 x 47.1 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Madragoa, Lisbon.
Back: Rineke Dijkstra, Julie, Saskia en Tecla, 1994. Courtesy of the artist.
Pregnancy and giving birth
Although pregnancy and birth are just as universal as love and death, there are relatively few depictions in Western art history. For a long time, people considered depictions of pregnancy inappropriate since they indirectly suggested a sexually active woman. That information was private and should be kept that way. Contemporary artists see the necessity of making this lived experience the subject of their art. In this, they also respond to the need for information and exchange on the experiences of motherhood, birth and ‘matrescence’ – the physical and mental transition to motherhood. These artists depict matters realistically and also dare to show intimate physical aspects like the photoseries of Rineke Dijkstra do, here shown in the back, featuring the mother’s body just after having given birth. Siwani’s work pays a tribute to the pregnant Black woman, depicted as a calm, self-evident presence. From a distance, this looks like a sculpture made of green bronze, but it is made of green soap, referring to an imposed idea of purity. Their work creates a space for the layered and sometimes contradictory reality of motherhood.
In the background in the photograph on the left, we see Louise Bourgeois’s work, where the complex relationship between motherhood as an institution and as an experience plays a major role. In her many experiments with form and material, we see a development in which she is increasingly able to take responsibility for her own conflicting desires and anxieties. Influenced by both psychoanalysis and second-wave feminism, Bourgeois managed to situate her fear of abandonment as a daughter, and her conviction that she had failed as a mother, as a condition of motherhood—a condition of women’s oppressed construction under patriarchy. ‘Feminism is important to me,’ she has often confirmed in interviews. She thus transforms the Oedipal desire to be loved into the desire to love, and to be an active, sexual, giving, and creative being. This artistic journey can be witnessed throughout her oeuvre and is most beautifully illustrated by her collaboration with Tracey Emin in the Do Not Abandon Me (2009) series, which consists of a series of gouaches made by Louise Bourgeois, and given to Tracey Emin to work on further.
Good Mom/Bad Mom – Natascha Libbert (Centraal Museum, Utrecht, 2025).
Back: Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin, Do Not Abandon Me Series, 2009. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London.
Front: Femmy Otten, Birthland, 2025, lime wood, 210 x 50 x 60 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Guerrilla Girls, Guerrilla Girls demand a return to traditional values on abortion. Pro-choice march, Washington, D.C., 1992. Courtesy guerrillagirls.com © Guerrilla Girls.
My Body, My Choice: An Ongoing Battle
A long battle has been and still is being fought for women’s bodily autonomy. Over the centuries, many artists, writers and thinkers have fought for a woman’s right to make her own choices, especially regarding her body and her position in society. Family planning and the provision of contraceptives has long been opposed by the church and others. These rights have to be actively guarded and sometimes re-fought.
The fact that motherhood can be discussed in the broadest sense here is thanks to the women’s liberation movement. For the achievements that we rely on today we lean on the shoulders of the many people who fought and continue to fight battles, large and small, to achieve them
Good Mom/Bad Mom – Natascha Libbert (Centraal Museum, Utrecht, 2025).
Tyna Adebwola, Back of Bank Chronicles (from the #motherwombseries), 2023, acrylic on canvas, 205 x 355 cm. Courtesy of Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam.
Mothering – caring in a collective system
#motherwombseries is Tyna Adebowale’s visual ode to the women who raiser her – her five mothers. In the Uneme community in Nigeria, where she grew up, it is common for a child to be raised not only by their biological mother, but also by several maternal figures. It was only when the artist began travelling that she realized this natural, communal way of parenting was rarely the norm.
Instead, when motherhood and (child)care are addressed, the concept of the ‘nuclear family’often comes up. The idea that a family consists of a father, a mother and one or more children is relatively new and today has run its course. Many other forms of care exist in which childcare is not the sole responsibility of one person but borne by a larger community. Mothering is a verb referring to the act of caring and raising a child. This activity is obviously not just reserved for people with children. It is a broad concept that encompasses all kinds of kinships and relationships, where the collective is paramount.
Colophon
Good Mom/Bad Mom has been created in close collaboration with many artists, lenders, collectors and makers.
Curation: Heske ten Cate & Laurie Cluitmans
Curator Through the Abdominal Wall: Trudy Dehue
Project manager: Lotte van Schellen
Research and assistance: Ada Harpole, Clairie Hondtong, Laura Korvinus, Roos van Laer, Natasja Wagendorp
Advice: Rosemarie Buikema
Exhibition design: Studio Thomas Dirrix
Made possible by:
The exhibition is one of the five exhibitions of Horizon Europe Project RE-WIRING. RE-WIRING has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation program under Grant Agreement n° 101094497.
