Quaint Sunday/Mary's Penis N°3 Painting Anouk Lamm Anouk - Anouk Lamm Anouk

Quaint Sunday/Mary’s Penis N°3

2024, 2025, 200x150cm  

“Quaint Sunday / Mary’s Penis”
A Series

“Quaint Sunday / Mary’s Penis” opens a quiet, intense visual space where spirituality, gender, vulnerability, and intimacy intersect in radically new ways. In these works, Mary is depicted as a trans woman—not as a provocative gesture, but as a sincere reimagining of the sacred archetype. The biblical mother figure is re-embodied: not distant or untouchable, but human, permeable, visible.

Formally echoing the Pietà, the scene is charged with ambivalence: Mary holds the lifeless body of her son, who in turn holds his mother’s penis—a gesture that can be read as both tender and unsettling. It is a moment that reverses traditional power dynamics; the divine becomes corporeal and queer.

Mary’s opened wrist, dripping blood, becomes a central motif: pain as revelation, the wound as portal. This blood is neither dramatic nor ornamental—it drips quietly, almost incidentally, as a sign of existential truth. It points to what can no longer be hidden: one’s own body, one’s own story, one’s own truth. The title “Quaint Sunday” also plays with ambiguity: a quiet, sacred day, and at the same time, a site of subtle disturbance. What is “quaint” here—what is strange—the penis, the prayer, the blood?

Thematically, the series opens a conversation with queer theology, raising questions of transcendence beyond binary conceptions of gender. It does not merely inscribe trans bodies into sacred visual traditions—it transforms those traditions themselves. The series claims a space where transness is not an exception, but a spiritual possibility: a presence that is wounded and, at the same time, healing.

Formally, everything remains reduced, almost ascetic. No superfluous gestures, no narrative embellishments—only fragments of bodies, lines, absences. This reduction creates space for meaning: the gaze is guided, slowed, drawn into meditative focus. Through the combination of minimalism and theme, a visual devotion emerges—art that does not shout, but whispers with quiet intensity.

The series is deeply personal and yet universal: it speaks of identity and pain, of visibility and redemption, of the possibility of recognizing oneself in an image that did not exist before. It is a queer sacrament. A quiet revolution.