Hildegard von Bingen

Firestorm Foundation acquired Hildegard von Bingen at the exhibition Mentors (CFHILL, Stockholm, 3 December 2021 - 7 January 2022). The group exhibition, curated by Sandra Weil (art curator living in Tel Aviv who promotes cultural exchange Sweden-Israel and is active in the Robert Weil Family Foundation’s work to defend and nurture democratic society), brought together international contemporary artists like Barbara Kruger (U.S.A., born 1945), Olafur Eliasson (Denmark, born 1967), Klara Lidén (Sweden, born 1979) and Rithika Merchant.

In the exhibition catalogue Saskia Neuman (Swedish writer and curator, regular contributor to publications such as Vogue and Artlover, in addition to curating solo exhibitions. Formerly the director of the Market Art Fair, Stockholm and director of the Absolute Art Award) wrote the following about Rithika Merchant:

Rithika Merchant studies epic mythology that reaches beyond the barriers of geography, all while evolving her own visual language, based on a vast collection of figures, and symbols. Inspired by, among other things, traditional Indian art and Mongolian miniature painting, her fundamental knowledge in Indian mythology and iconography allows her to expand the language she builds throughout her artistic practice, a language that has the ability to transcend boundaries and differing beliefs, and still is easily interpreted by the viewer. Her work, a fantasy marred with animal and plant life, can be read, and seen as a narration of a collective human history. […] Through her work the artist creates a red thread binding together our understanding of the power of human relationships, and the dependance we have in one another. […] Even though Merchant creates enormous detail in outlines and composition in the highly figurative paintings she paints she should not be identified as a graphic artist. Additionally, the artist uses her work to recognize global issues such as climate change, evident in her praised painting Harvest of the Land of Plenty, a mixed media collage from 2020. The five paintings presented in this exhibition offer insight into the artist’s world, allowing the viewer to delve into this continuous artistic language where nature and ritual collide. With titles such as Lycanthropy, 2015 the artist offers us a glimpse into her fascination with the mythology and the occult. This theme is continued throughout, evident in the painting Hildegard von Bingen, 2014 a reference to the revered 11th century saint-like mythicist, nun and writer. Time and again Merchant draws upon history intertwined with beautiful botanical imagery, references to folk art and mythology to create very dramatic, and romantic examinations of her own imagination.

Hildegard von Bingen (Latin: Hildegardis Bingensis; c. 1098 – 1179), also known as the ‘Sibyl of the Rhine’, was a German Benedictine abbess and a polymath active as a writer, composer, philosopher, mystic, visionary, medical writer and practitioner during the High Middle Ages. In her Vita, Hildegard stated that from a very young age she experienced visions. She is one of the best-known composers of sacred monophony, as well as the most recorded in modern history. She has been considered by a number of scholars to be the founder of scientific natural history in Germany.

Hildegard’s convent at Disibodenberg elected her as magistra (mother superior) in 1136. She founded the monasteries of Rupertsberg in 1150 and Eibingen in 1165. Hildegard wrote theological, botanical, and medicinal works, as well as letters, hymns, and antiphons for the liturgy. She wrote poems, and supervised miniature illuminations in the Rupertsberg manuscript of her first work, Scivias. There are more surviving chants by Hildegard than by any other composer from the entire Middle Ages, and she is one of the few known composers to have written both the music and the words. One of her works, the Ordo Virtutum, is an early example of liturgical drama and arguably the oldest surviving morality play. She is noted for the invention of a constructed language known as Lingua Ignota.

Although the history of her formal canonization is complicated, regional calendars of the Catholic Church have listed her as a saint for centuries. On 10 May 2012, Pope Benedict XVI (1927 - 2022) extended the liturgical cult of Hildegard to the entire Catholic Church in a process known as ‘equivalent canonization’. On 7 October 2012, he named her a Doctor of the Church, in recognition of ‘her holiness of life and the originality of her teaching.’

Provenance

CFHILL, Stockholm, Mentors, 3 December 2021 - 7 January 2022.

Firestorm Foundation (acquired at the above).