Within the format “Viewing the Collection & An Insert by…”, installations and groups of works are presented alongside highlights from the Painting Gallery’s collection. These inserts are conceived as interventions by contemporary artists within the temporarily arranged display of the collection. The insert by the Belgian artist Ana Torfs constitutes the third intervention in this series.
 

Under the title The Day You Were Thinking About the Sibyl While You Were Picking Autumn Leaves, Torfs presents for the first time a new cycle of 28 Jacquard tapestries. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the artist read Virgil’s Aeneid and, while walking and collecting autumn leaves, thought of the Sibyl of Cumae, who wrote her prophecies on leaves. Torfs pressed the collected foliage between the pages of international daily newspapers, photographed these arrangements, and later had them woven as large-scale tapestries, complemented by personal, verse-like textual fragments.
 

The result is a fragmentary tableau reflecting both the state of the contemporary world and the thoughts of an individual. The lyrical textile fabric lends a sense of permanence to the fleeting events of everyday life while pointing to a historically significant present whose future consequences remain uncertain. Like the Sibyl’s leaves scattered by the wind, today’s news and interpretations increasingly appear enigmatic.