Day 4 is a day of lost and regain.

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Children carry hope. They carry the future, and a love not yet fully formed. Day 4 is for them — for all our lost and regained children.

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Ronald Ophuis paints what is hardest to look at. Miscarriage, 1998–2013 begins in the most private place grief can live — the loss of a child before the world has even met them. From there the works move outward, into history that is still happening: Kosovo 2000, Gaza 2007, infants whose futures were taken by forces far larger than any one body. Oliver Tree, Palestine — one tree, one root, the branches drawn to show what the children share, where they come from, what connects them still. And then: Dounia and Haziem, Nederland 2023. A mother holding her children.

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The chronology is the argument. Ophuis does not illustrate suffering — he accumulates it, deliberately, until the final image of holding becomes almost unbearable in its tenderness.

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Day 4 does not resolve the loss. It insists, against everything, on the regaining.

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