Landscape from memory
Althuis Hofland is proud to present the group exhibition ‘Landscape From Memory’ bringing together works by artists from an older generation. artists Aurélie Salavert, Abel Rodríguez, Scott Kahn, Marliz Frencken, Salvo, Jan Knap and Yuri Rodekin. The exhibition brings together works by artists from an older generation, sharing a deep fascination and respect for the tangible world surrounding them.
Aurélie Salavert (1966, FR)
Every painting, drawings collage or watercolour on paper by French artist Aurélie Salavert is an associative momentum, bringing together flashbacks of the artist’s memory into a new universe full of wonders. A universe not bound to language, time or places, which is emphasized by the absence of titles, and dates within the caption of the works.
Aurélie Salavert was born in Avignon in 1966. She graduated from the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Marseille in 1990. She lives and works in Brussels. In 1992 she received an individual grant for the
creation of the DRAC Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur - Ministère de la Culture. Her first solo exhibition took place in 1995 at the Athanor gallery in Marseille. In 2002, the Musée Calvet in Avignon organized a solo exhibition of Salavert, combined with works on paper by Rodin, Degas, Chagall and Toulouse-Lautrec. In 2008 she started collaborating with Galerie aliceday in Brussels.
Abel Rodríguez (1944, Colombia)
“My drawings are testimonies of a vanishing landscape” - Abel Rodriguez (Nonuya, born 1944 in Cahuinarí region, Colombia; lives in Bogotá, Colombia)
In the 1990s, the Colombian armed conflict and the exploitation of natural resources in the rainforest displaced Abel Rodríguez and his family from his native land to Bogota, the country’s capital. As a way to preserve his knowledge and memory of his region, Rodríguez creates detailed paintings and drawings that depict the ecosystem of the rainforest in the Nonuya region with intricate details of the flora and fauna. His knowledge is highly valued by western botanists, and has gained international recognition over the past five years within the visual arts.
Recent exhibitions include a.o. : BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle, UK (solo, 2020); Among the trees. Southbank Centre, Hayward Gallery, London, UK (2020); El árbol de la vida y la
abundancia, Instituto de Visión, Bogotá (2019); XXII Triennale di Milano : Broken Nature: Desing takes on human survival, Milan, Milan, Italy (2019); Toronto Biennial of Art, Small Arms Inspection Building, Toronto, ON, Canada (2019); Documenta 14, documenta Kassel, Kassel, Germany (2017)
Good read: https://elephant.art/the-indigenous-colombian-elder-painting-ancestral-knowledge-from-memory-abel-rodriguez-27032020/
Scott Kahn (1946, USA)
Scott Kahn is a painter based in Connecticut and New York. Kahn creates landscapes, still-life and portraits that comprise a combination of detailed yet slightly gestural brushstrokes while utilizing sharp, juxtaposing perspectives, creating dream-like overtones. For the artist, painting is a visual diary. These colorfully riveting, foreshortened environments serve as lyrical metaphors for what one sees.
Kahn received his BA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1967 and his MFA from Rutgers University in 1970. He has been awarded grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Recent exhibitions include; Harper’s Books, Easthampton, USA, “Diary Continued” (solo, 2019); Harper’s Books, “The Circus Has Been Cancelled”, Easthampton, USA (group, 2020). Upcoming solo exhibitions include Francois Ghebaly, Los Angeles (USA); Harper’s Books, New York (USA); Bill Brady
Gallery / ATM Gallery, New York (USA).
Salvo (1947-2015, IT)
Many of Salvo’s paintings portray pastoral scenes and quaint villages created with a vibrant palette of oil paints. They reference architectural motifs and plant species native to the cities where he lived, worked and visited. In a stylistic manner these paintings can be placed within the tradition of de Chirico and Carra, however Salvo’s works focus more specifically on complex psychological narratives and abstract concepts like time instead of the industrialization and modernist motives of de Chirico and Carra. These motives are emphasized by the titles of his paintings and use of light referring to season’s, months or specific moments of the day.
Figurative painting entered Salvo’s practice only in the mid 1970’s, less known was his involvement in the Arte Povera movement and the reciprocally collaborative influence Alighiero Boetti and he had on each other in that time, whilst sharing a studio in Turin.
Salvo was born Salvatore Mangione in Leonforte, Sicily, in 1947 and lived and worked primarily in Turin until his death in 2015. Solo presentations of his work include; Gladstone Gallery (2019); the Museum Folkwang, Essen (1977); Mannheimer Kunstverein (1977); Kunstmuseum Lucerne (1983); Museum
Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (1988); Musée d’Art Contemporain, Nîmes (1988); Villa delle Rose, Bologna (1998); Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo (2002); Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin (2007); Museo d’Arte della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano, with Alighiero Boetti (2017). He also participated in Documenta 5 (1972) and the 1976 and 1988 editions of the Venice Biennale.
Marliz Frencken (1955, NL)
The oeuvre of artist Marliz Frencken spans over 40 years of painting, sculpture and installation. A re-
curring motive in her work is the female form, often related to the self and as subject deriving from her mother’s early death. Since 2019 Frencken started using ceramic in her practice, resulting in a series of organically shaped vases, and erotisized cup-, and pot-like objects. Alongside these sculptures Frencken started painting roses in a variety of vases and colours. The roses - similar to the ceramic objects - are reminiscent of fragile yet strong and elegant human bodies.
Marliz Frencken (1955, NL) has been educated as a fashion designer at the Art Academy in Arnhem
(currently known as ArtEZ). Although it hasn’t always been easy for a female artist to find appreciation in the masculine art world of the ‘80’s and ‘90’s, there has certainly been success for Frencken in the past. She was nominated for the Prix de Rome, and the royal award for painting; had a solo exhibition at Barbara Farber, a solo exhibition and international representation by the Rotterdam based avant-garde gallery Bébert, and later on she had exhibitions with the legendary Belgium curator Jan Hoet, and also Hannah Hagenaars and Jan Hein Sassen (Stedelijk Museum) were true advocates of her work. In the late 80’s and 90’s her work has been included in many collections, a.o. wihtin the Miami based Rubell Family Collection. Upcoming solo exhibitions include: Kunsthalle St. Annen, Lübeck (DE) curated by Antje-Britt Mählmann.
Jan Knap (1949, CZ)
Since the mid nineties Knap has been living a sequestered life in the Czech Republic, deliberately far away from the busy art world, to maintain his focus on technique and genre. This deliberate hide away slowed down his presence in both galleries and museums in the last couple of years. It is especially this consistency of creating worlds of hope within the sphere of political and social pessimism that gives his work renewed relevance in these days, apart from the contemporary usage of historical subject matter and techniques.
Knap is also a member of Group Normal, which is a German Czech group of artists formed in 1979. The group consists of the artists Peter Angermann, Jan Knap and Milan Kunc, who met in the early 1970s at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the classes of Joseph Beuys and Gerhard Richter. They championed the rejection of individualism and, in line with this, created a large number of joint works – paintings that in some cases were done in public. The declared ambition of the three artists was to overcome the
predominating and elitist “academic avantgardism” by an art as demystified and accessible as possible. Jan Knap and Salvo have been great admirers of each others practices, and influenced each other along the years.
Knap’s artistic biography starts in the 80’s with major solo exhibitions at the Holly Solomon Gallery in New York (1988), Galerie Mot & Van den Boogaard Brussels (1994), Centraal Museum Utrecht (1996), Sperone Westwater Gallery New York (1999) a.o. Group exhibitions include “XI Biennale de Paris” at Musée d’art Moderne, Paris (1980), “Normal” at Neue Galerie - Sammlung Ludwig, Aachen (1981), “Nice biennale”, Nice (1981) amongst many others. Works of Jan Knap are in the collection of many major museums world wide and at the private collections of artist David Hockney, pop star Madonna and many others.
Yuri Rodekin (1960, RU)
The work of Yuri Rodekin, who lives and works in Austria, can be characterized as a kind of magical realism. Characters are caught in full meditation, living in a utopian world that Rodekin creates in his paintings. All intriguing works that carry a story. Feelings of sadness and loneliness take shape in a poetic and expressive way of painting. The ongoing battle between reason and emotion is captured in Rodekin’s works: a moving vision of a world that will not be alien to any of us.
Exhibitions include: Ornis A. Gallery, Amsterdam (2010, 2013); Studio d’arte Raffaelli, Trento (2009); His work was also shown in collaboration with the works of Jan Knap and Salvo at Victor Saavedra, Barcelona (2005) and a.o. within the exhibition DANDY, at Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague, curated by John Sillevis.