This new NGV exhibition examines historical images of maternity alongside works by real artists made during the throes of motherhood
When asked about her art-making practice later in life, after her children had grown up and left home, the German artist Käthe Kollwitz replied: “I work like a cow grazes.”
She didn’t mean she was relaxed, content and experiencing a newfound creative liberty; she meant that her work was suffering from the absence of child-rearing demands. Time now stretched out and her art-making, similarly uncontained, had lost its urgency.