Commissioned for the Beeldspoor series at the Rotterdamse Schouwburg by architect Wim Quist.

During the research for my work in the exhibition Opera Aperta for the Venice Biennale of 2011, I became fascinated by the phrase that meanders through time, art and society: "Who’s Afraid...".

It all started with the song from Walt Disney's animated film ‘The Three Little Pigs’: Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf, in which the wolf was seen as a metaphor for the Great Depression of the 1930’s. Adolf Hitler used to whistle the song frequently, and, obsessed with the wolf as an animal, recognized Wolf as his own pet name.

A scene in which the Big Bad Wolf knocked on the piglets' door, dressed up pretending to be a Jewish peddler, was hastily removed after the film's release in 1933. However, it remained a character with a big nose and a Yiddish accent.

Much later, in 1962, the phrase was paraphrased by Edward Albee, when he called his play 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf'. He stumbled upon it in his regular pub 'The Complexes', where was written on the mirror in what I imagined to be the classic green Palmolive soap by an anonymous person.

With the phrase, Albee actually asks: who is able to live without illusions?
A beautiful paradox for a play which is itself an illusionary form.

Sometime later Barnett Newman paints 'Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III' (1966-67). This was my first overwhelming experience of art as a nine-year-old. Speechless with rage and incomprehension, I ran out of the museum. After an act of vandalism in 1989, at which time I was an art student and had become an total fan of the painting, an endless soap opera began around this work, because the restoration took an endlessly long time, cost an enormous amount and especially because the painting itself seemed to have lost all magic afterwards.

For the image plate in the Rotterdamse Schouwburg, I opted for a reference to the story behind Albee's play: the image plate is a mirror on which, screen-printed in 'Palmolive-green', the text is repeated that Albee saw in his favorite pub: WHO'S AFRAID'.

mirror and silkscreen print
size 105 X 90 X 0,5 cm