A child sits cross-legged on a plinth, hood drawn up into a hare’s long ears, eyes fixed on something small and gold cupped in its hands: a snail. “Slow Down” (marble composite, 80 cm) is Hannes Verhoeven’s clearest statement of a theme he returns to across his practice — the distance between how fast we move and how present we actually are. The hare is the animal built for speed; the snail, cradled rather than fled from, is what the piece asks the hare-child to notice instead.
Verhoeven casts the same design twice: the open-air version shown here, and a smaller cast, “Slow Down in Bell Jar” (33 cm), sealed under glass as if pausing were itself something that needed protecting. Both are worked in a material the artist calls marble composite — resin bound with fine marble powder, built up to a surface closer to skin than stone, and finished in the same tan-to-charcoal gradient that runs through the hare’s fur into the child’s bare hands and feet.
The piece sits inside a wider body of work in which children wear the heads of animals — a fox holding two small gilded figures in “Balance,” an eagle with wings thrown open in “Learning to Fly,” a bull with arms spread wide in “Here Comes the Rain” — each hood a different way of asking what an animal’s instinct might correct in a human one. Verhoeven, born in 1984 in Esbeek in the Netherlands, works these smaller pieces mostly in bronze, resin, and marble composite from his atelier there; his largest public commission, “De Melkfabriek,” scales the same rural, animal-centered thinking up to an 8-meter steel-and-wood cow grazing in an open field.
“Slow Down,” along with the rest of Hannes Verhoeven’s work, is on display on his artist profile on Art Fair.
