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Manuela Klerkx , Kunstagent, auteur & redacteur Gallery Viewer
Klerkx buys art: five works of art under € 500
No, I'm not going on a holiday this summer. I am staying in Amsterdam and take advantage as much as I can of what is there to see and do and what is (still) possible and allowed. Today, the sun is out, the sky is blue, so I decide to jump on my bike, take the ferry from Amsterdam-Noord and go down town to as many galleries as possible. I feel like seeing art, or rather, I am mood for buying art. And I have to take advantage of that, I decide. I can buy art for myself, or for my husband, for no particular reason, or because he may also be celebrated. Or because of our upcoming eighth wedding anniversary. We like to give each other art gifts on special occasions. In memory of a special moment during a city trip or a summer vacation. As a kind of permanent reminder of a fleeting moment. Somehow buying art feels less like consuming and more like 'doing good'. Not only for yourself, the buyer, or the recipient who you will please, but also for the artist and the gallery owner. You can say this holds for art in general. Also, you will not easily find a more personal gift. In order not to make it too crazy, I set myself a maximum amount of €500. After all, I also have to pay the rent, repair my bicycle and I also want to buy that pair of shoes that I have been preying on for months. But now let's see what this day of art brings!
Afra Eisma
0 Éléments multimédias ᛫ 8 Oeuvres disponibles
1 Spectacles ᛫ 0 Points forts ᛫ 0 Recommandations
At Ellen de Bruijne Projects I notice the work of Afra Eisma. In an article in Mr Motley I read that this artist, born in 1993, prefers to share her world with others, that she wants to give the visitor something. Her work is mainly about love, dependence, generosity and fusing with the other. In 2017, she graduated from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. Eisma wrote the following remarkable words about her graduation project "Sunkiss Attitude":
The small work "Blushy 5" moves me because it is poetic and raises many questions. It is the latest in a series of five glazed ceramic objects, which I believe represent a feminine face. The eyes are closed in all versions. The flushing increases and decreases. In the last portrait a large part of the head and face is missing. What could that possibly stand for? For hidden fears or fantasy or for the part she doesn't want to share with us? I think it is a beautiful work. I’ll keep it in mind and continue cycling.
Fictive presences - odd characters and personalities - with sun kissing attitudes. The nagging sound of a hammer in your head - allergic to your own sweat. Don't drop your birthmarks on the floor. Here I present to you, my overwhelming hodgepodge of colourful sculptures and images, portraying my fears as well as my fantasies. Ranging from humour to tragedy, to be as playful as gloomy.
The small work "Blushy 5" moves me because it is poetic and raises many questions. It is the latest in a series of five glazed ceramic objects, which I believe represent a feminine face. The eyes are closed in all versions. The flushing increases and decreases. In the last portrait a large part of the head and face is missing. What could that possibly stand for? For hidden fears or fantasy or for the part she doesn't want to share with us? I think it is a beautiful work. I’ll keep it in mind and continue cycling.
0 Éléments multimédias ᛫ 16 Oeuvres disponibles
1 Spectacles ᛫ 0 Points forts ᛫ 0 Recommandations
‘Shattered vase of a sunburst floor, ‘Nightmare on Worringer Strasse’, ‘You have to jump over the fence to see the new moon’, ‘Donkeys always jump up when the snakes crawl’, etc.
The titles of the work of the Arhem-based Iranian artist Arash Fakhim (1987), are simply delightful. His paintings, which usually do not involve any brushstrokes, make me happy. I get energy from the anarchistic, cheerful playfulness with which he manages to bring otherwise worthless material to life. I am actually cheating here because my husband, Oscar van Gelderen, and I already bought a work of his at Art Rotterdam last year. Whom could I give his work to? That person must be sensitive to Arash's eye that is directed at both the of the Middle Eastern and Dutch culture, the country he grew up in.
The titles of the work of the Arhem-based Iranian artist Arash Fakhim (1987), are simply delightful. His paintings, which usually do not involve any brushstrokes, make me happy. I get energy from the anarchistic, cheerful playfulness with which he manages to bring otherwise worthless material to life. I am actually cheating here because my husband, Oscar van Gelderen, and I already bought a work of his at Art Rotterdam last year. Whom could I give his work to? That person must be sensitive to Arash's eye that is directed at both the of the Middle Eastern and Dutch culture, the country he grew up in.
“An art work should never be too clean for me. If you fly over the Netherlands, you see the fields, you see a Mondrian-like pattern. Everything is framed. But if you were to fly over the Middle East, you would see those folds just like on your duvet. And that is spatial. I always try to find a combination in that. A painting is already a frame for me. I'm trying to escape from that grid. That matrix.”
(Source: indebuurt.nl, Arnhem, 05022019). And he succeeds quite well at that, because his "paintings" refuse to fit into the classical Western, academic frameworks of what a painting should be. He prefers to determine this himself on the basis of the materials that remind him of the past and present, his adopted country and his distant native country. Since only in that combination he feels right at home. Maybe I should just purchase another one for ourselves. We have a couple. Another nice gift for our wedding anniversary. The day isn’t over yet, so ...
6 Éléments multimédias ᛫ 53 Oeuvres disponibles
6 Spectacles ᛫ 8 Points forts ᛫ 6 Recommandations
I notice a diptych in the shop window of the Caroline O’Breen gallery. It concerns the photos "Ágak" (tree branches) & "Törülköző" (towel) from the Melankólia" series "by artist Satijn Panigay, a true master in celebrating everyday objects and situations. The simplicity and nostalgia that burst from the photos are irresistible. I park my bike and while placing my hands between my forehead and the gallery window I try to get as close as possible to the images. I don't want to miss a detail. In Satijn's work I recognize the sensitivity to the beauty or the peculiarity of a particular moment, such as a sunbeam on a towel hanging to dry or a twig dying on a bed. Somehow, I tend to "read" her photos as a "mood board" that resonates with my emotional life. It makes me happy and quiet at the same time and I decide to go for a ginger tea in a tea room, right next to the gallery. As I stare outside, I think of the image of the pair of scissors on the bed. How beautifully life and death are depicted here in the combination of a twig, symbol of life and scissors that can make the difference between dead and alive, between then and now.
4 Éléments multimédias ᛫ 25 Oeuvres disponibles
0 Spectacles ᛫ 1 Points forts ᛫ 2 Recommandations
GalleryViewer states that G4 is short for artists' collective "Gang of Four" consisting of Aldert Mantje, Peter Kempff, Toon den Heijer and Menno Schenk. Mantje explains the name of the collective as follows:
A few years ago, the lot met for the first time and decided to start a collective. Each artist adds his own work to the body of work time after time without the individual touch disappearing. The symbolic, figurative painting style of Aldert Mantje in particular gives the works a somewhat alienating character, as do the portrait drawings of the artists. The paintings of G4 are also called "Journalistic Paintings" since they often take a newspaper photo as a starting point and then - partly - paint it. With this they indicate that each painting arises from reinterpreted current events. G4 have now drawn over 600 portraits of artists, a kind of family tree of the art world from 1970 to the present, ranging from Marc Bijl to Francis Bacon and from Tinkebell to Ai Wei Wei. The project is named after 'The Famous Artists School', an American institute where you could learn to draw in 24 lessons. The right motivation for these anarchists not to be involved with art. Yet, says Peter van de Kemp, “the sheer number of drawings make it an interesting concept again despite their apparent silliness". And I cannot argue with that. I would like to give my father a portrait of Joseph Beuys, or no, rather a portrait of someone like Tinkebell, because he must keep up with the times.
"We are the" Gang of Four ", named after a popular British, politically engaged band from the seventies. But really we're just a bunch of old men messing around.
(Vice, 10022017). A few years ago, the lot met for the first time and decided to start a collective. Each artist adds his own work to the body of work time after time without the individual touch disappearing. The symbolic, figurative painting style of Aldert Mantje in particular gives the works a somewhat alienating character, as do the portrait drawings of the artists. The paintings of G4 are also called "Journalistic Paintings" since they often take a newspaper photo as a starting point and then - partly - paint it. With this they indicate that each painting arises from reinterpreted current events. G4 have now drawn over 600 portraits of artists, a kind of family tree of the art world from 1970 to the present, ranging from Marc Bijl to Francis Bacon and from Tinkebell to Ai Wei Wei. The project is named after 'The Famous Artists School', an American institute where you could learn to draw in 24 lessons. The right motivation for these anarchists not to be involved with art. Yet, says Peter van de Kemp, “the sheer number of drawings make it an interesting concept again despite their apparent silliness". And I cannot argue with that. I would like to give my father a portrait of Joseph Beuys, or no, rather a portrait of someone like Tinkebell, because he must keep up with the times.
1 Éléments multimédias ᛫ 10 Oeuvres disponibles
1 Spectacles ᛫ 0 Points forts ᛫ 0 Recommandations
Alice Lucchinelli (1993) grew up in a small town in Italy where you cannot not be who you are, where being a woman is inferior and being gay or queer is taboo. Her website states: "I am an Italian photographer based in Rotterdam. My origin shapes my work. I have an aesthetic view of the world. Beauty is precious. Photography empowered me and freed me to become myself. I use beauty to celebrate queerness, femininity and cultural identity. I want my viewers to feel empowered as well and [I want to, MK] free them from their taboos. She considers herself happy with friends who, like her, have no taboos and with whom she can discuss everything. When she discovered that her friends had some sort of "queerness" that fascinated her, she started observing their lives and capturing them with the camera as characters in her photographic stories. By not conforming to the limits of their conservative environment, her friends started a small but loud revolution in her. She sees Alice's visual quest for sexual identity, femininity and queerness, theatrically or rebelliously, as her way to highlight these topics. Photography offers her the opportunity to be herself and she also uses it to encourage others to be themselves. For that reason alone, I would like to buy this photo. For myself or one of our feminist daughters of 18 and 22 years old who are involved in this kind of theme every day. Because the more openness about this theme, the better. Also, or perhaps precisely, in the art world where the first steps to a new era are often taken.
Unfortunately, time’s up and I haven't bought anything yet. I promise myself to continue this search because there is plenty of choice. Much more than I thought for that budget. A pleasant surprise. To be continued…
Unfortunately, time’s up and I haven't bought anything yet. I promise myself to continue this search because there is plenty of choice. Much more than I thought for that budget. A pleasant surprise. To be continued…