14 november 2025, Editorial team
Adriaan Rees: Reconstructing Memories
In Reconstructing Memories, Adriaan Rees (b. 1957, NL) brings together a selection of works spanning more than a decade of his artistic practice. Porcelain sculptures, collages, photographic works, installations and objects all share the same core: the ongoing interplay between East and West. The exhibition marks Rees’s first solo show at Coppejans Gallery, with whom he has been collaborating since 2020.
The presentation is notably museum-like: generous space around the works, a sense of calm, as if each object were an anchor point of time and place. Rather than showing only recent works, Rees and gallerist Stijn Coppejans chose to create a tension between old and new; between works realised in 2010 and those from 2025, made in Georgia, Japan, China or Berlin. Each of them still resonates strongly with him today.
For Adriaan, the title Reconstructing Memories refers to the active process of remembering, a process in which memory continually unfolds into something new. “Reconstructing Memories is a notion that has occupied me for a very long time. I gradually came to realise that memories change and always return as something else. Each memory, in a sense, is remade. Once I understood that, a new world opened up for me,” explains Adriaan Rees.
Reconstructing memories, 2018, The Acrobat, 2016, Coppejans Gallery
This idea forms both the conceptual and formal starting point of the exhibition. The works bear traces of travel, time, cultural differences, craft, and encounters. Rees is a sculptor who never detaches the place he works from the work itself. His materials stem from a landscape, a city, a studio that shapes him at that specific moment as both artist and human being. “For more than 25 years, I have been on a constant journey from West to East (Japan, Korea and especially China) and back again. The notion of travelling has become increasingly important to me. When you stay in another culture for a long time, you are thrown back onto yourself and when you return, you see your own culture more clearly. Travelling, in that sense, is always also a way of coming home.”
Adriaan Rees, Reconstructing memories, Coppejans Gallery
Rees works with ceramics, porcelain, wood, photography and found objects. All these materials are both geographical and mental residues of the places where the works were created. “I always want to immerse myself in the local culture, materials and techniques of the place where I stay. This leads to collaborations I would never achieve in my Amsterdam studio.” His studio in Jingdezhen, the Chinese city where porcelain was invented, is crucial in this regard. Since 2006, he has worked there with local craftsmen. “It has profoundly changed my life and work. I can realise so much more there thanks to the knowledge and help of all those skilled artisans around me.”
The exhibition covers works from 2010 to 2025: from collages made in a former East Berlin studio in 2014 to a recent piece from Georgia, where Rees has stayed three times in recent years as both artist and lecturer at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts. Georgia is also a place where the tension between West and East becomes particularly tangible. “The newest work is a small installation of a wooden school desk with a plate, bowl and drinking cup. The three ceramic elements are black-fired, decorated with traditional motifs. I made them in the northwest of Georgia, near the Russian border. Each bears the inscription ‘No war’ in Georgian. These are things we should learn as children and lessons that should be spoon-fed to us. Georgia lies at the heart of Eurasia, where cultures meet and collide. It is under great pressure from Russia, much like Ukraine. Around 30% of the country has been annexed, and you can feel it. Inevitably, that reality enters the work.”
Adriaan Rees, The Wing, 2010, Coppejans Gallery
Rees has been collaborating with Coppejans Gallery for several years, and the gallery continuously challenges him to explore new directions. It was Coppejans who, in 2021, gently encouraged him to experiment with performance, a discipline that initially created friction but eventually became an enriching addition to his practice. There is no performance accompanying this exhibition, as Adriaan currently finds himself abroad. “Right now, I’m deep in the jungle of Suriname, in a village along the Suriname River called Botopasi. Everything is different. It’s pouring outside, and the wind is picking up. I need to close the shutters. What am I doing here? Why am I here? Reconstructing Memories.”
The exhibition Reconstructing Memories is on view at Coppejans Gallery in Antwerp until Sunday 30 November.
