Zwei Antlitze – Die Wegkapellen-Madonna und die ephesische Artemis [Two Countenances – The Wayside Chapel Madonna and the Ephesian Artemis]

According to the legend, Mary, after the death of Jesus, went to Ephesus (situated in the territory of modern Turkey) with the disciple John. Today, near Ephesus is a place of pilgrimage, the House of the Mother Mary, her supposed final resting place.

The installation Zwei Antlitze – Die Wegkapellen-Madonna und die ephesische Artemis consists of two elements: an etching by François Perrier from 1638 and the so-called Wayside Chapel Madonna.

Both figures can be found standing on a square stone. Engrossed in a millennia-old dialogue, they are two sisters, the same thing embodied differently.
Gabriel searches by looking for Maria, the female goddess of Christianity, but he also finds the descendant of Isis and Astarte, the foam-born Aphrodite and Hathor, Kybele and Artemis. In Mary, Gabriel finds the manifestation of a principle inherited from the mother deities of the ancient world.

The Wayside Chapel Madonna comes from a pilgrims’ chapel, closed in 2011, that was located on the Way of St. James in Belgium. The rough concrete figure shows a strong and intrepid Madonna crushing two snakes under her feet. By choosing this figure, which is iconographically closely related to the motifs of the Crescent Moon Madonna and the Virgin of Victory, the artists underline the power of the particular Mary which feels most close to them.

In the figure of the Ephesian Artemis, in a nearly exemplary symbolic form, a multitude of narratives telling of the migration of god’s names intersect.
Artemis, the virgin Greek-Olympic goddess, is the patron of the nascent life. Here in this depiction we see her as she was worshipped specifically in the ancient metropolis of Ephesus. The pictorial tradition goes back to an older goddess who was worshipped at the same place: the Anatolian goddess Kybele, the so-called Magna Mater.