For more than a decade, Gallery Bart has been selecting the best rising talents out of the graduates of the Dutch art academies. This year we present ten artists that are taking the scene by storm, five in our gallery in Amsterdam and five in our project space in Nijmegen. The New Talent 2019 participants in Amsterdam are:
Tibor Dieters
Photogram series Exposure is made by mailing boxes, turned into pinhole cameras, as packages to unsuspecting galleries. The artist determines the size of the hole in the box and chooses who is to be the recipient, but what the package photographically records as a ‘black box’ is largely determined by the journey it takes. In this manner, Tibor Dieters makes the otherwise invisible route between artist and gallery, sender and recipient visible, as well as the unforeseeable artistic process that precedes the final images.
Natasha Rijkhoff
Water flows, drips and splashes out of ceramic sculptures. They transform their surroundings into a place where the familiar and the strange converge, like fountains in a hidden garden or paradise that you happen to enter, and set the stage for human interaction: meeting others, relaxing, contemplating or dreaming. For Natasha Rijkhoff, the poetic garden is a recurring theme, both as a starting point and as a metaphor in the final result.
Zahar Bondar
As a descendant of a family of circus performers, Zahar Bondar grew up surrounded by others. This shortage of personal space and surplus of communality determined his artistic vision: he creates his art not by working alone in the confines of a studio but by interacting with others. His fascination for the human body is expressed in life-sized sculptures, whose outcome cannot be guessed in advance and openly reveals the working process.
Jorge Luis Barragán Castaño
The fact that a Garden of Drawings can be created through the use of media other than pencil and paper is shown by the sculptural objects of Jorge Luis Barragan. For him, a drawing is a way of materializing ideas in various media with contrasting qualities. Delicate watercolours, for example, offer a counterbalance to heavy sculptural forms. The traditional notion of what comprises a drawing thus makes way for a personal view of the matter.
Myrto Christou
By her own account, Myrto Christou searches for an oasis in the desert of the empty canvas but at most she finds a mirage. She captures the stories that arise during this search for ‘something in the big nothing’ in her mood paintings, where we not only encounter a mood but also a dark edge or dash of humour. For if it all turns out to have been for nothing, in any case you could have laughed, according to Myrto.