Lika Mutal

Sculptor

Lika Mutal – Vermeulen was born in 1936 in Geldrop, the third of twelve children of painter Piet Vermeulen and pianist Lia Schlaghecke. Lika grew up in Bilthoven and attended Bonifatius College in Utrecht. From an early age, she felt a strong artistic urge. The large family, and the resulting lack of strict control, gave her the freedom to explore this. She wanted to attend drama school but joined Wim Kan & Corry Vonk’s ABC cabaret in the late 1950s. At Haarlem station, she met Sylvio Mutal, a UNESCO diplomat, who immediately fell for her. They married in 1962 and, two years later, moved with her two daughters to Colombia, where she established a puppet theatre and attended art academy. Initially, the puppets were figurative; later, they became more abstract. She realised they were not puppets but sculptures. When Silvio Mutal was transferred to Lima, Peru, she attended the art academy there. For Lika, the country was a shock, marked by strong contrasts. A poor country with an ancient culture that was rapidly changing. An untouched nature, with impenetrable rainforests and high mountains on one side. On the other side, a rugged desert against which the Pacific Ocean crashed. It invited exploration and growth, both as a person and in a quest for new materials. She discovered ancient stone techniques that she blended with modern methods. ‘A stone opposite a woman, my body as an instrument came to life,’ she said about this. Peru provided the landscape that later fermented in her work.

At the art academy, she further developed under the inspiring guidance of Italian director Anna Maccagno and master stonemason Don Juan. He taught her the love for stone and sculpting without gloves. After the academy, she started her own practice in 1972. Don Juan taught her to ‘listen’ to the stones and how to move them when she found them in the desert. Due to the subtle colour differences in travertine, she longed for more colour in her work. Meanwhile, she received rave reviews after exhibitions in Amsterdam and Paris. She kept her distance from the art scene. Too many influences would paralyse her. That was also the reason not to fully immerse herself in pre-Columbian nature. In Cuzco, she was overwhelmed by the architecture, and it taught her a lifelong lesson. She said: ‘Cuzco taught me that nothing in pre-Columbian art was done out of opportunism, but because it had to be done.’

Following the previously described Quipus series, came the series ‘the Ones’ and ‘The Labyrinths’. Since 1983, she has exhibited at the Nohra Haime Gallery in New York, where she alternately lived for periods of six months. She said: ‘Like Peru, New York has something rugged, unfinished, and this invites one to work with it. Both places possess a great deal of creative energy. I can immerse myself in the nature of Peru, but I feel the whip or pressure of New York.’ Conceptual art was dominant in NY, and this brought about a minor crisis because matter, so crucial to her, was paramount. It gave her work a raw edge that it previously lacked. The choice of granite as a material provided more colour, a smoother surface, and verticality in her work. This verticality is frequently encountered in New York’s architecture. A hard-won balance between nature and culture, two main sources of her work. In 2004-2005, in Lima, she created the work El ojo que Llora / The Eye that Cries, which contains the names of over 30,000 victims of terrorism in Peru. For this, she received the Jose Maria Arguedas Prize in 2007. Lika Mutal passed away in 2016, at the age of 80. Peter de Waard wrote an obituary in de Volkskrant: ‘Her sculptures are characterised by rough, jagged edges and smoothly polished surfaces. They are expressions of the duality of the Peruvian landscape: the beautiful beaches versus the carcasses found there.’ He could not have better articulated her craftsmanship and skill.