The latest acquisition made by Kent students for the Kent Print Collection is the Dutch artist Marcelle Hanselaar’s 2015 etching Broken promises, trafficked women.
This print is part of her superb series The Crying Game which takes its cue from two previous sets of etchings that document violent crimes and inhumanity: Otto Dix’s Der Krieg of 1923-24 and Francisco Goyas Los Desastres de la Guerra of 1810-20. Hanselaar has spoken of her need to bear witness to recent horrors, in particular violence against women, and that ‘etching with its harsh bitten lines offset by the poetry of aquatint is the perfect medium’ in which to do so. As the art critic Laura Gascoigne comments: ‘In the shocking imagery of The Crying Game, Hanselaar drags herself out from behind the barrier, and us with her’.
