Artwork of the month - video (1 min).

Fertility Rock Well*Ness

Year	2026
Size	100 cm × 200 cm x 0.1 cm
Materials	Digital print on flag / textile
Edition	1/1
For Sale	Yes, contact our gallery Fred&Ferry (Antwerp, BE)
Share

We tend to perceive time as linear: things begin, unfold, and end. Quantum physics proposes a different model, one that is less linear and more circular, where phenomena vibrate, recur, and loop rather than simply start and stop. Perhaps Neolithic people already intuited this. Much of ancient visual culture points toward circularity and vibration: stone circles, round burial mounds, coves, cairns, spiral motifs, mandalas, concentric forms. Again and again, the circle appears as a fundamental structure.

The Neolithic period marks a decisive turning point in human history. It is the moment when sedentary life, agriculture, and collective organization took hold, redirecting the course of human existence. The world we inhabit today is, in many ways, a direct continuation of that shift. Beneath contemporary infrastructures lies a Neolithic logic of settlement, ritual, and relationship to land.

Robbert&Frank Frank&Robbert seek to reconnect with these Neolithic roots. Their work is driven by a search for provenance and meaning, a desire to understand where certain gestures, forms, and beliefs originate. To do so, they travel to significant ancient sites, carrying with them a series of artworks. These works are brought into the public domain and consciously activated on site. Activation is essential: only through interaction with place, landscape, and context do the works fully come alive. The artworks become porous, unfolding their meaning through encounter.

During recent journeys through the United Kingdom and Finland, the artists visited several Neolithic locations. In Britain, they traveled to Stanton Drew, the second-largest stone circle complex in the country. Located on the floodplain of the River Chew, the site forms part of what archaeologists describe as the Neolithic Highway, an extensive network linking northern Scotland with mainland Europe. Growing archaeological evidence suggests that Neolithic societies were far more interconnected and sophisticated than once believed. Rather than isolated groups, they may have constituted a highly organized, transregional culture with deep, largely intangible knowledge of nature, cycles, and the cosmos.

In their search for this lost knowledge, and simultaneously for their own artistic identity, Robbert & Frank engage with these sites through contemporary gestures. One of them is walking in circles; around ancient monuments, landmarks, helicopter platforms, artworks. This is a practice that the artists have been doing for a while now, scattered all over Europe. This adds to the circular notion of the Neolithic wisdom.

Another practice is the moving of stones and boulders. Echoing the Neolithic practice of transporting stones across vast distances, Frank and Robbert have chosen to not move the material itself, but its image. An image of a Stanton Drew boulder was transformed into a flag. When placed in a contemporary landscape, the flag functions as a portal, connecting distant locations across time.

The flag is set against the backdrop of the castle of John de Marnix de Sainte Aldegonde, a local landmark that may indicate one of the earliest settlement points in the region. Within this historically layered setting, the flag operates as a temporal bridge between Neolithic times and the contemporary timeframe. Concealed within the image of the Stanton Drew boulder is a small fertility sculpture previously created by the artists. Revealed through the larger form, it links monumentality to intimacy, and anchors the work in ideas of birth, origin, and emergence.

This work directly links with the origin story of Bornem, the town where Robbert & Frank open their new solo exhibition Wellness* on February 22.

The title carries layered meanings. Well refers to the source, the spring, water as origin, but also as a reservoir of hidden knowledge. Ness evokes a body of fresh water, a lake, a site of accumulation and reflection. Bornem itself has Neolithic origins, developing as a pole village in a swampy, water-rich environment. The land still bears traces of this liquidity.

- - - - - - - - - -