Opening on March 11, 2023
From 14:00 - 19:00 hours
11.03.2023 - 22.04.2023
This Sleeping-Painter Dream - solo - Jan ten Have
'(Bizarre, immediate, emotional, spectral, beautiful & suicidal.)
On lead, I painted faces in grisaille. Very precise; they are deep in the painting. And from those portraits in grey and lead white, the image emerged. In a mysterious way, those figures kept working through. More violent. More touching; precisely because they were crudely erased by all those layers of glass. And the more I chiselled them away, the more they came back like cut diamonds on glass . . . free, and deep enough to be their image.
- Jan ten Have, February 2023
A pure painter, Jan ten Have entered the gallery in 2011. After a 17-year stay in Kythera, Greece. That pure painter Ten Have has always remained. But always working in other media. An artist also who gave himself the task of "painting himself away," leaving only the work that matters. During the time I work with Jan, he is constantly reinventing himself. 'Frank, forget everything I made before this, look at this!' Ten Have once stepped into a monastery asking if he could use their ceramic kilns, lived with the rhythm there and made porcelain paintings thinner than the monks thought possible. He did an artist-in-residence at the world-renowned EKWC and combined porcelain with glass. Now he has freed himself from the kilns and is making yet another step, in line with his oeuvre. Pulverized glass, lead, oil paint, but still paintings. And they are beautiful.
With his solo, the gallery also launches his feuilleton; an edition of 33, all unique, all different. Available per work for €40.00.
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FLASH-BACK – solo - Daan den Houter
Daan den Houter brings together multiple, conflicting, subjects into one work. This results in pieces that are in conflict with themselves. It encourages discussion of one's own existence and the viewer's opinion. With humour and cynicism, he creates a different perspective on the subject matter of art and our own assumptions about our daily living environment.
FLASH-BACK shows the documentary about his 8-hour drawing factory for which he hired workers to literally turn their working time into drawings consisting of 8 simple lines. Part of his ongoing series of 8-hour drawings that he has been working on since 2002; this drawing consists of 8 simple lines that he puts down on paper during a working day. Signed and dated on that day, on which he took an hour over each line. The series is complete when he has finally drawn every date of the year. With the 8-hour drawing factory, Den Houter generated six drawings in one day without putting a line on paper himself.
In this retrospective, among other things, he completes his series WIGS with a fourth: wigs made from his own hair. With this, Den Houter explores his own identity as an artist. It offers him the opportunity, dressed as himself, to generate a persiflage on himself, by himself. So far he has made 4 wigs, the same hairstyle, at different periods in his life. Each wig is a self-portrait in the image but also in the encapsulated DNA structure in the hair. A flashback to another time preserved in the artist's dead cells.
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PARTITA No. 444 – solo – Saminte Ekeland
Embroidery drawings in transparent plastic, enamel paint, and linen thread.
Rhythm, straight lines, transparency, layering, concentration, repetition, intersecting lines touching and sometimes not.
These abstract works reference both the Zero movement in art and J.S. Bach's Partitas. In the famous Rolling Stone interview (1974), Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, for many the greatest interpreter of his Partitas, explained why he never gave piano lessons: 'the technical aspect I explained to you in half an hour, but that doesn't mean you are a good pianist. A bit like life. You are thrown into life, but what matters is what you do with it.'
This is how I see the lines in my work. I try to reflect on its complexity. Easy to Learn. Fucking Hard to Master.
- Saminte Ekeland, February 2023