BREAKING #303

‘That dizzying, hopeless procession of transformations’

Nicole Ex

Column

February 2026

Nicole Ex

is a writer, art historian, and founder of See All This art magazine. Since 2020, she writes a weekly column for the BREAKING-the-week art newsletter.

Column

February 2026

She told me she’d read Ovid’s Metamorphoses (43 BC-AD 17) during her studies. Pleasantly surprised, I forgot to ask what it had given her. There she is, at the early press preview of Metamorphoses at the Rijksmuseum. She is the very image of what this is all about – with that little mermaid in her belly, who in a month’s time will be driven ashore by her.

Everything changes. ‘Nothing endures and nothing perishes,’ is the Latin poet’s simple conclusion – and he writes it beautifully and it feels true, too. But there are days when you can’t quite bear that dizzying, hopeless procession of transformations. Moments when you want to shout at the spinning world: Not now. Just stand still for a moment.

But quiet and peace is not what you’ll find in his 12,000-line poem. There is rape, dismemberment, destruction – out of jealousy and revenge. Fleeing Apollo’s pursuit, Daphne becomes a laurel tree. Punished after the weaving contest with Minerva, Arachne becomes a spider. Consumed by self-love, Narcissus dissolves at the water’s edge and becomes a spring flower.

‘It’s my swansong,’ jokes Frits Scholten, who has curated Metamorphoses as his final exhibition as sculpture curator, with a startling eye for tactility, finesse, coherence and sublimation. When you look for years, you begin to see. They will miss him at the Rijksmuseum – as I will miss my pregnant sphinx for a while, Sarah: guardian of the temple of paper.

When she returns, she will have changed into a mother. When she returns, there will be a child. And we managed perfectly well without – but soon, never again. Metamorphoses. It’s Sunday afternoon. In a moment I’ll send her this column. And then I’ll write her those precious, reassuring words –words that, for now, are no longer a given:

‘See you tomorrow, Saar!’

— Nicole Ex,
founding editor