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Wouter van den Eijkel
Preview Season: 8 shows about nature & climate
This Friday is the day, then the Amsterdam gallery season of the autumn of 2021 commences. You have probably already received the invitations for openings, the press releases are ready and by the time you read this the gallerist are busy installing their exhibition.
Just like the graduation exhibitions at the art academies, an opening of the gallery season gives a good impression of what is currently being made and which themes are at play. The theme that receives the most attention by far is nature and how we deal with it, no fewer than 9 of the 35 exhibitions are about nature or related themes such as climate change, carbon footprint, consumerism and sustainability.
The other major theme of our time, social inequality, is also well represented. In six exhibitions, attention is paid to topics such as gender and identity (Group exhibition Equal Affections at GRIMM), histories that fall outside the Western perspective (Raquel van Haver at the Kersgallery), prejudice (Sarah Maple at BosxKoch), racism (Isaac Julien at Ron Mandos) and class (Inge Meijer at Akinci). As every year, there are debutants, five to be exacts, and 6 exhibitions in which artists continue to build on their oeuvre, including: Peter Struycken (Andriesse Eyk), Philip Akkerman (Torch), and Helen Verhoeven (Stigter Van Doesburg).
And what about the pandemic?, I hear you say. Well, the pandemic comes off rather poorly and only plays a part in three shows. It’s the main motive of Theater at GoMulan, which details how artists Tobias Asser and Peter Zegveld underwent the lock down, and it features as a backdrop of the show at Marian Cramer Projects, featuring work made during the lockdowns, while Jens Pfeifer incorporates the subject in his poetic sculptures at Lumen Travo. Apart from that, the words Corona and pandemic were absent in the press releases.
This collection focuses on the theme that is discussed most often: nature and our relationship with it. A broad topic that can be discussed in many ways. While Anne Geene points out the unobtrusive beauty of nature and Lex ter Braak has an eye for the linguistic clichés in which we capture her, Claudy Jongstra sounds the alarm with her nomadic Woven Skin exhibition at Fontana. Our consumerism and exploitation of our planet’s resources is addressed in the work of Uta Eisenreich and Giulia Cenci, while Rademakers explores the possibilities of sustainably made art. Johan Scherft outlines what awaits us: a kind of tropical all-in destination where the only thing on the menu is survival with no room for art and culture.
Just like the graduation exhibitions at the art academies, an opening of the gallery season gives a good impression of what is currently being made and which themes are at play. The theme that receives the most attention by far is nature and how we deal with it, no fewer than 9 of the 35 exhibitions are about nature or related themes such as climate change, carbon footprint, consumerism and sustainability.
The other major theme of our time, social inequality, is also well represented. In six exhibitions, attention is paid to topics such as gender and identity (Group exhibition Equal Affections at GRIMM), histories that fall outside the Western perspective (Raquel van Haver at the Kersgallery), prejudice (Sarah Maple at BosxKoch), racism (Isaac Julien at Ron Mandos) and class (Inge Meijer at Akinci). As every year, there are debutants, five to be exacts, and 6 exhibitions in which artists continue to build on their oeuvre, including: Peter Struycken (Andriesse Eyk), Philip Akkerman (Torch), and Helen Verhoeven (Stigter Van Doesburg).
And what about the pandemic?, I hear you say. Well, the pandemic comes off rather poorly and only plays a part in three shows. It’s the main motive of Theater at GoMulan, which details how artists Tobias Asser and Peter Zegveld underwent the lock down, and it features as a backdrop of the show at Marian Cramer Projects, featuring work made during the lockdowns, while Jens Pfeifer incorporates the subject in his poetic sculptures at Lumen Travo. Apart from that, the words Corona and pandemic were absent in the press releases.
This collection focuses on the theme that is discussed most often: nature and our relationship with it. A broad topic that can be discussed in many ways. While Anne Geene points out the unobtrusive beauty of nature and Lex ter Braak has an eye for the linguistic clichés in which we capture her, Claudy Jongstra sounds the alarm with her nomadic Woven Skin exhibition at Fontana. Our consumerism and exploitation of our planet’s resources is addressed in the work of Uta Eisenreich and Giulia Cenci, while Rademakers explores the possibilities of sustainably made art. Johan Scherft outlines what awaits us: a kind of tropical all-in destination where the only thing on the menu is survival with no room for art and culture.
6 Media items ᛫ 79 Available artworks
9 Shows ᛫ 24 Highlights ᛫ 0 Recommendations
Anne Geene’s Book of Plants takes you on an expedition through the microcosm from leafs, buds and flowers to branches, stems and trunks. A world with an immeasurable variation in colour, shape and size. Geene is a photographer, but the photo is rarely central. It’s merely a means to document her projects. Her work is about collections and how different collections relate to each other. With Book of Plants she continues to build on an oeuvre that expresses the remarkable beauty of the inconspicuous.
(Galerie Caroline O'Breen)
(Galerie Caroline O'Breen)
0 Media items ᛫ 11 Available artworks
12 Shows ᛫ 0 Highlights ᛫ 0 Recommendations
Author-cum-artist Lex ter Braak pays tribute to the versatility of trees with Bilderbaumbuch. Ter Braak follows the evolution of trees in his drawings, photos and paintings. Mindful of W.H. Auden's words that a culture is no better than its forests, Ter Braak has an eye for literary and cultural-historical clichés that stick to trees and nature. “Can we free nature from our falsified clichés, carve it free from the fossilized language that suffocates it, detach it from the decals that have stiffened it into a well-thumbed album?”
(galerie dudokdegroot)
(galerie dudokdegroot)
0 Media items ᛫ 17 Available artworks
3 Shows ᛫ 0 Highlights ᛫ 0 Recommendations
At gallery Fontana, people and the earth are central. At 11 Lauriergracht, photographs of Illanit Illouz covered with a salt layer can be seen. For Illouz, the salt layers are a metaphor for the volatile political situation in the countries bordering the Judean Desert and the Dead Sea: Israel and Palestine. Woven Skin can be seen two doors down; the impressive nomadic exhibition by Claudy Jongstra. In this exhibition, which toured from one environmental summit to another for the past two year, Jongstra expresses her concerns about climate change, the decline of biodiversity, social injustice and the disuse and disappearance of traditional crafts..
(Galerie Fontana)
(Galerie Fontana)
2 Media items ᛫ 42 Available artworks
5 Shows ᛫ 1 Highlights ᛫ 1 Recommendations
How do you turn everyday objects into symbols of a bigger story, that is one of the questions that Uta Eisenreich explores in As if. She borrows her visual language from commercial photography. Cheap, everyday objects are beautifully presented, but at the same time have something dramatic and ominous. As if they remind us of the ecological impact of our consumerism. Eisenreich’s eponymous new book will be launched at the opening.
(Ellen de Bruijne Projects)
(Ellen de Bruijne Projects)
Giulia Cenci
0 Media items ᛫ 9 Available artworks
1 Shows ᛫ 0 Highlights ᛫ 0 Recommendations
Italian artist Giulia Cenci debuts in the front space of Gallery Fons Welters. With her installations and sculptures, she criticizes the concept of the Anthropocene, in which humanity is said to be superior. However, according to Cenci, man's destructive consumerism puts the same pressure on the ecosystems it destroys. In her post-apocalyptic sculptures she depicts a world with a level playing field for people and nature. In the back room is the group exhibition Combine, with work by Adriano Amaral, David Jablonowski, Tenant of Culture and Jennifer Tee.
(Galerie Fons Welters)
(Galerie Fons Welters)
0 Media items ᛫ 29 Available artworks
6 Shows ᛫ 0 Highlights ᛫ 0 Recommendations
In Beyond Transparency Jens Pfeifer investigates the phenomenon of transparency. A transparency only exists because of the information behind it. If the underlying information was not there, there was no need for transparency. By making things transparent, new information is created that in turn has to be investigated. Transparency can therefore create knowledge. Pfeifer explores this new knowledge in a poetic way in the series of sculptures Exercises in Observation, which refer to recent global events, such as the pandemic and climate change.
(Lumen Travo Galerie)
(Lumen Travo Galerie)