Absorption

"Visually, Adriaan Diedericks’s Absorption strongly recalls Michelangelo’s non-finito slave statues, wherein a human form is only partially carved from a block of marble in order to thematically convey the challenge and burden of individuation. Diedericks’s bronze shifts Michelangelo’s philosophical inquiry into the realm of power dynamics inherent in Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic, by depicting two figures – who are either embracing or tussling – locked in a struggle of perpetual ‘becoming’. The seeming liquidity of the bronze suggests a certain inversion of Michelangelo’s marble, the fusing of mind and consciousness, and self and other into a singular consolidated entity."

Text by Tim Leibbrant