Artist, Wolfgang Tillmans: I think Kollwitz’s sculpture The Lovers from the mid-1910s shows something that lovers often dream of, which is this idea of melting into each other.
Writer, Sheila Heti: It looks like it’s one form, even though it’s two bodies. I’m just thinking about those times when you’re lying in bed with somebody that you love and it just almost feels like you lose the sense of separation and feel like one form.
Curator, Starr Figura: It also echoes a number of works that Kollwitz created, in which you see a mother embracing a child who is dying or dead. In some of her works, it seems almost as if there’s a blurring between the kind of love a mother would have for her child and the kind of love a woman or a man would have for their partner.
There’s a drawing nearby that also depicts lovers. It’s part of a series of erotically charged drawings that Kollwitz made in the aftermath of an extramarital affair. She never showed those drawings during her lifetime and actually kept them a secret.
Wolfgang Tillmans: In the drawing, all the attention is on the line of contact, how the arm is pressing onto the back. There’s a real sensual beauty. That’s, of course, the talent of a great draftswoman, to translate an emotion, a feeling of touch, into a line of pencil so that you can read it.