‘Stilte’, 1980 – 1981, bronze, 180 x 75 x 40 cm
Maja van Hall (1937, Voorburg) is considered one of the most important post-war Dutch sculptors. She studied at the Royal Academy in The Hague and the Rijksacademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. Already during her studies she chose her own course. Her urge to experiment with forms and materials makes her oeuvre particularly varied and unique. ‘My work is my biography’ is one of her mottos. Storytelling sculptures characterize her early work and a critical view of society rigorously transformed her work, with formal language producing large and powerful sculptures in bronze and stone.
Since the mid-1970s, Maja van Hall, more than she ever dared before, began to take space for her work. In 1977 she cut through the bandages of a chair-bound figure with a deliberate cut. A cool, golden form, a sun breaks outward: a new human being. The old man, the old skin, will soon fall off him like a skin that is no longer usable. In the sculpture, the wrappings have disappeared. One does see traces of them on the body, which sits stiffly on a chair in the form in which it was bound. This image is called Stilte.