Female Corporeality and Religion 2023
Online Art Exhibition
The Mother of God ‘Breastfeeding’
Kateryna Kuziv
Iconography
Board, levkas, egg tempera, gilding with white gold
40 х 30 cm
2023
€750
Description
This is a deeply archetypal image of maternity, representing the woman as a source of life and nourishment. Besides its immediate Christian meaning (Mary as the Mother of God who gave birth to the Son of God as a human child), in Christian tradition this image also symbolically represents the Church feeding its children with the Word of Life. This iconographic type has become especially popular in the Coptic tradition, in the Italian Renaissance art, and in later Byzantine iconography. In the 19th and 20th centuries in Ukraine this icon was often placed in homes, which might be seen as a reaction to the common experience of famines. (ST)
Kateryna Kuziv
Kuziv Kateryna (b. 1993) is a Ukrainian artist and icon painter. She believes that the icon should be in a dialogue with a modern person, and not a historical artifact. She considers the icon as a visual theology.
She is a lecturer at the Department of Design and Fundamentals of Architecture at Lviv Polytechnic National University. She graduated from the Lviv National Academy of Arts, Department of Monumental Painting. She is the author of five personal exhibitions. She has participated in over 25 plein-airs shows and joint exhibitions in Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Finland, USA, Georgia and Germany. Her works are held in museum collections in Ukraine, Poland and private collections.
