Museum Valkenburg will show an intriguing exhibition by Karin van der Linden from Weert in the Jacques Vonkzaal from 5 May to 9 June 2019. Karin’s work exudes an atmosphere of memories, both in terms of performance and thematically. This is in fact the essence of the work. Memories offer Karin fixed values, with which she gives her work meaning and direction. Karin van der Linden (1957) starts making assemblies in 2010. To this end, she collects orphan materials: objects, or parts of them, with a past. By combining them, melting them together and adding their own creations, penetrating atmospheric images are created. Her recent work shows a shift towards working with and processing textiles. Embroidery plays an increasingly important role, without the images losing in intensity. The themes she deals with in her work are topics from daily life: love, death, the life cycle and letting go. In her work she links the mysterious lives of her mother and grandmother, as well as the influence that these lives have had on her own life, to the aforementioned themes.

To feel the work of Karin, a piece of family history is essential: Her grandmother Anna marries and settles in the early twentieth century in Germany. A son is born from that marriage. Anna leaves husband and child and leaves for the Netherlands. She never spoke about how and why. She gets a new relationship, falsifies her name and marries him. Together they have a son. The family finds a home in a monastery in Krefeld and thus avoids prosecution for bigamy. The couple lives and works in the monastery and in 1921 Maria, Karin’s mother, is born there. In 1932 the family leaves the monastery for Eindhoven. Maria is then 11 years old. Many years later, during holidays with her parents, Karin regularly visits the German monastery. She mainly remembers the dark, charged atmosphere and the unanswered questions: what has become of Maria’s half-brother, and what drives a mother to leave her child and thus say goodbye to it completely and definitively …