At our new location in Heusden, we will open the season on August 29 and 30 with the exhibition Apostrophe. This presentation consists of two parts: a solo exhibition featuring work by Marien Schouten and a group exhibition with work by gallery artists. Together, they mark the next step in our gallery adventure. With pride we settle into the beautiful building on Putterstraat. It holds a special meaning for us because Kunsthandel Lambert Tegenbosch was located there for many years, and the current structure of the house and garden was designed for the gallery at the time. The opening presentation is an ode to that background. With the title Apostrophe, we address not only the past, but above all the future. Together with the artists, we hope to add a new chapter to the illustrious history of this place.
You are cordially invited to the opening on August 29 and 30, from 2:00 PM to 6:00 PM, with opening remarks around 3:30 PM on both days. Please register via the RSVP-link on our website. We hope to welcome you to Heusden, at Putterstraat 48.
In This Dark House
Marien Schouten
An L-shaped architectonic sculpture titled In This Dark House is being shown by Marien Schouten. This installation made of plywood is an exhibition space within the gallery space, a construction that invites us to approach the works from various perspectives and to put our senses on edge.
A work period at the European Ceramic Work Centre in 2023 brought about a change in the artistic practice of Marien Schouten (Andel, 1956). The experiments with clay helped him to discover an aspect of his own artistic sensibility that had been unknown until then. Schouten: “In 2022 I did a painting titled Beads. Here I was thinking of a lion skin that had been worked with strings of beads. It occurred to me that this could also be a good motif for ceramic sculptures. In the following year at the EKWC, I produced a series of ceramic sculptures that could be regarded as fragments of the painting, not so much in a literal sense but due to being made on the basis of the same approach. Then, in 2025, came a large group of small ceramic sculptures, also departing from that same idea. In an intuitive manner I pushed the solid clay with my fingers and knuckles into a wide range of organic forms. The parallel lines that were thus imprinted in the clay are reminiscent of the undulating lines of an animal skin. In some places I introduced egg-shaped ‘beads’. Parts of the little sculptures were covered with a thick, slightly shiny glaze that made the skin and beads become fused with each other.”
With increasing frequency Schouten let himself be guided by intuitive impulses. “I see it as the artist’s role to make the subconscious less opaque,” he writes in the beautiful book Ground & Figure, Figure & Ground, published by Jap Sam Books last year. Here he tells us that ‘repetition’ is a way to become familiar with a motif whose meaning is not entirely clear right away. “A motif, when repeated in different contexts, combined with other motifs or performed in various media, accumulates its own history. Each repetition reveals the motif’s characteristics in a new light. Over time, the motif becomes more familiar and specific. There is no need to analyze its origin any further; simply perceive its new reality.”
The concept of repetition is one of the fundamental principles in Schouten’s multimedial oeuvre. Another recurring element is juxtaposition, placing next to each other elements that contrast– be it, as is now the case, the exhibition space and the work, the figure and the ground, the spatial and the flat, or the transparent and the opaque – but which do communicate with each other and create new connections. In his architectural installation In This Dark House sculptures are shown in combination with works on paper. Both older and more recent work. The works influence each other, but as Schouten says, it ‘doesn’t come to a conclusion’, since every work poses its own questions and evokes its own associations. The physical space in which the works can be seen by the light of a few bare bulbs underscores this and gives rise to a certain sense of compression. Everything turns inward, and unlike the neutrality of the white cube, an atmosphere of concentration and personal internalization prevails here. The construction of the installation, with its open slat structure at the top, thus never becomes ‘oppressive’. Schouten mentions that he arrived at the idea of the Dark House after Covid struck, a period in which people had to function in isolation from each other. That forced inwardness proved to be a concept that once again has meaning in the context of the current times. Schouten’s house is dark, perhaps even sinister, but the energy that is visibly and palpably present in the work process takes shape in an installation which is a feast for all the senses.
(translation: Beth O’Brien)
One by One
The group presentation features work by several of the gallery’s artists: Sander Breure & Witte van Hulzen, Tom Callemin, Cristina Lucas, Lorian Gwynn, Paul Kooiker, Fernando Sánchez Castillo, Dieuwke Spaans, Emma van der Put, Evi Vingerling, Marenne Welten, and Aimée Zito Lema. Here, too, we are showing a mix of older and new work. It is a colorful preview of the solo and group exhibitions we hope to create in Heusden with all our artists.