‘Four things to see’ is sponsored by Bloomberg Connects, a free arts and culture platform that provides access to museums, galleries and cultural spaces around the world on demand. Explore now.
Each week we bring you four of the most interesting objects from the world’s museums, galleries and art institutions, hand-picked to mark significant moments in the calendar.
Born on 17 October 1915, Arthur Miller left his mark on American theatre by conveying, with eloquence and empathy, the struggles, dilemmas and frustrations of ordinary people. His plays mined profound and uncomfortable truths from domestic drama, finding universal significance in tales of travelling salesmen, factory workers and suburban families. In ‘Tragedy and the Common Man’, an essay of 1949, Miller argued that ordinary people’s grapples with moral questions and social pressures contained all the dramatic potential of the greatest tragedies.
Visual artists have always been drawn to everyday subjects. Depicting anything from agricultural labour to kitchen-table conversations, these works can elevate the mundane to the monumental, find meaning in routine gestures and familiar spaces, or celebrate quiet heroism. This week we explore four works that honour the ordinary, revealing how artists transform daily experience into something compelling.
El hombre (The Man) (n.d.), Rufino Tamayo
Universidad de Monterrey (UDEM), San Pedro Garza García
Tamayo’s bronze figure stands with stoic simplicity, embodying the University’s motto of ‘Homo Hominis In Ministerio Perficitur’: people achieve fulfilment through service to others. The artist’s characteristically simplified design transforms an anonymous individual into a universal symbol of human dignity and potential. Stripped of specific markers of identity, this everyman confronts what Tamayo called ‘infinity’ – the questions of existence that pertain to us all. Originally intended to represent academic distinction, the sculpture instead celebrates something more fundamental: the common person’s capacity for growth, service and moral courage. Click here to find out more.
The Plough (1929), Ethel Spowers
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
Spowers renders agricultural labour through linocut techniques, capturing the tensions between human effort and natural forces. The ploughman’s steady progress and persistence contrast with the chaotic energy of the surrounding birds. This emphasises the quiet heroism of physical work, where success relies more on patient endurance than on dramatic gesture. Spowers transforms back-breaking labour into a slow dance of complementary rhythms, celebrating the farmer’s fundamental importance. Click here to read more.
Hay Boats, Brittany (c. 1900), Rupert Bunny
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Bunny’s pastoral scene captures the harsh realities of the rural idyll as workers strain to move hay through Brittany’s waterways under an exhausting sun. His use of colour transforms documentary observation into emotional insights: a chain of bright red and vermillion connects the figure in the foreground to the boat that demands his arduous labour. The composition reveals multiple stages of fatigue and recovery, from the sheltered worker pausing to drink, to his sun-beaten colleague behind. Bunny refuses to romanticise rural labour, acknowledging the physical toll of work as well as its dignity. Click here to learn more.
Untitled, from the Kitchen Table series (1990) by Carrie Mae Weems
Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville
From her own kitchen table, Weems constructed an entire fictional life that reflects universal experiences of love, family and identity. The overhead light creates theatrical drama from domestic routine, transforming everyday conversations and meals into open-ended, enigmatic scenes. Weems’s head-on placement of the camera makes sure that we know we’re witnessing intimate moments. The series demonstrates how the kitchen table, that most ordinary piece of furniture, can serve as a stage for life’s most significant dramas. Click here to discover more.
‘Four things to see’ is sponsored by Bloomberg Connects, a free arts and culture platform that provides access to museums, galleries and cultural spaces around the world on demand. Explore now.