All four of them are talented artists, young and female. Under the name Intersection Natasja Alers, Florentijn de Boer, Joana Schneider and Leonie Schneider meet each other in the exhibition at Rademakers Gallery.
Shiny, juicy and plump, the ceramic works resemble a string of intestines or dripping sausages draped into a tower. The unique ceramic objects are attractive and repulsive, sensual and raw at the same time. The collages of human body parts and the exuberant colorful and shiny glazes, ask to be desired and touched and at the same time the viewer may not want to be confronted with the inner human body or descend into the inner world of the human mind.
The specific color combinations of the "visceral" glazes refer to internal organs and define how the human body can relate to a sculpture. Natasja Alers plays with that area of tension, those paradoxical feelings and expectations of the viewer.
The artist, graphic designer, DJ, and co-director of the Grauzonefestival in The Hague, has been fascinated by the material clay and the human body from an early age. According to Natasja, her sculpture of lushly draped breasts, shown at the exhibition, symbolizes the celebration of the body and creates a sense of transience.For the series EDITIONS she made an edition work especially for Rademakers Gallery: a raw pimple vase with nipple prints of herself. entitled Nipple Vase.
Transience and movement
After a series of abstract works combining fragmented elements of magical realism, manga comic books, lush landscapes with unknown flora and otherworldly civilizations, Florentijn de Boer's new layered "flower still lifes" are more figurative and homely in nature. The world has literally gotten smaller. Just like in flower still lifes by old masters, Florentine's new works are about transience, but also about purity.
The artist freezes time on the canvas; the flowers, shapes and patterns stop for a moment in their development towards irrevocable transience. At the same time, she introduces the suggestion of movable matter into the works, as if a wind breeze lights up a piece of fabric or makes the flower leaves vibrate.
Transience is also depicted in paintings in which the textile patterns are reminiscent of summer beach chairs, umbrellas or tablecloths whose colors have been faded by the sun. Vague outlines recall an original object that has been there in the sun for a long time but has been removed and left an empty space. In this way the artist also makes visible the effect of the sun as well as the passage of time.
In contrast to the old masters, the flowers in the compositions of the contemporary artist are isolated, drawn from their original context - nature - and the underlying landscape consists of repeating graphic patterns for which the reliefs, mosaic floors and tiles in Italy are sources of inspiration. shapes and which she bends to her will, as in the work Touch Nothing Never Nowhere. By digitally cutting, pasting, resizing, mixing elements and allowing shapes to 'overlap', parts are no longer visible or appear. She thus plays with spatial and depth effects.
The sisters Joana (1990) and Leonie Schneider (1993) use different techniques and materials to create monumental works in which family and 'home' play a role in a completely different way than Florentijn de Boer does.
Die Rietdeckerin
As a contemporary artist, Joana Schneider uses traditional techniques of Dutch craftsmen and natural, sustainable or recycled materials. Just as the fishermen in the port of Katwijk are her teachers in making her expressive and theatrical masks from colorful recycled fishing ropes and nets, she studied the age-old techniques of the thatchers.
It offers us food for thought about phenomena such as handicrafts and craft that are no longer appreciated in our contemporary (digital) world, as a result of which knowledge and the age-old culture threaten to disappear, but also about typical male professions such as fisherman and thatch. As a tribute, she made "De Rietdekster", a portrait of a female thatcher on a roof. For the Flux series or the dune and prairie landscapes with bright shiny colors and color gradients, she has been using a self-developed machine and a self-invented technique to wrap shiny yarns around the fishing ropes for a year now. However, she recently discovered that she could wrap not just one color but several colors around one rope, creating beautiful smooth color gradients and surprisingly giving the work painterly qualities, as if Joana was a painter.