IRRLÆUFER

In “Pale Mother” IRRLÆUFER draws on Albrecht Dürer’s iconic imagery—particularly his depictions of the Virgin Mary with the Christ Child—and transforms it into a somber, contemporary vision. The linocut shows a skeletal Madonna holding an emaciated child. The Christ Child, who in traditional iconography symbolizes hope and redemption, appears starved and exhausted, clutching a Bible that offers him neither comfort nor sustenance. It becomes a symbol of spiritual emptiness, of a faith that can no longer save anything.

The composition remains true to Dürer’s rigor and symmetry: the radiant crown, the crescent moon, the sublime pose. But IRRLÆUFER strips the motif of its divine purity, revealing instead the fragility of the sacred. The “Madonna and Child” becomes a “Memento Mori Mother”—an allegory for the decay of religious and moral certainties.

In the delicate, high-contrast lines of the linocut print, a tension arises between veneration and critique, between faith and decay. “Pale Mother” is not blasphemy, but a meditation on the finiteness of the divine in the face of human suffering.

IRRLÆUFER creates an image here that oscillates between devotion and the abyss—a silent icon of exhaustion that questions whether salvation is still possible when even the saints starve.

---