andriesse~eyck gallery opens the cultural season with Koen Taselaar’s solo exhibition 'Ornamental Slapstick', featuring new works in ceramics, textiles and on paper. 'Ornamental Slapstick' will be the artist’s first exhibition at the gallery.
In the world of Koen Taselaar (Rotterdam, 1986), things are always just that little bit different. Take, for instance, the colourful, jacquard-woven tapestry 'Thalossophobia No More', in which the central motif is the mythical seven-headed dragon. According to legend, the only thing the evil monster fears is water. In Taselaar’s depiction, however, the dragon has mastered its dread of deep waters, and the age-old myth takes a new twist.
This light-hearted and sometimes absurdist approach typifies Taselaar’s artistic practice. Taselaar draws inspiration from diverse subjects: from medieval tapestries like the 'Apocalypse Tapestry' from Angers (F), the labyrinthine drawings of M C Escher, Radical Design from the 1970s, the puzzles of Enzo Mari, Pop Art, the design language of early computer games, to the everyday life of a young father. He quotes and combines, elaborates his ideas on paper or computer before translating them into his material of choice, which includes ceramics, textiles, paintings, or screen printing.
Taselaar is particularly interested in the way images are constructed and how new meanings may emerge when things are brought together in slightly different time-space relationships. For his recent series of tapestries, for example, he studied the typically flat, non-linear composition of medieval wall hangings, which, he discovered, is not dissimilar to the visual architecture of early computer games. Taselaar describes his work as ‘a stacking of motifs’. Literally, as in his totem-like sculpture 'A Snail And An Elephant' or the visual excess of the tapestry 'Thalossophobia No More', and figuratively, as an amalgam of comparisons and references, as in the woven work 'Sincerity Now' in which the banana peel refers to both the visual humour of slapstick; Andy Warhol’s Pop-Art record sleeve, and an eighteen-month-old’s favourite food.
Koen Taselaar (Rotterdam, 1986) works in a variety of media, including ceramics, textiles, screen printing, painting, pencil and paper. His artistic practice can be described as a search for formal and material properties of ‘the thing’, drawing inspiration from a wide range of subjects and constantly looking for unexpected twists in the relationships between things. Taselaar exhibits at home and abroad, and participated in group exhibitions at Marres, Maastricht (2022); Kunstmuseum Den Haag; Collectie de Groen, Arnhem; TextielMuseum, Tilburg and the MMCA Seoul, South Korea (all 2019), among others. In 2016, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen hosted his solo exhibition Meander Wildly. In 2020, commissioned by the Hermitage Foundation in St Petersburg, Taselaar designed an almost eight-metre-long tapestry recounting the history of Tsar Peter the Great. Taselaar’s contribution is currently on display in MELLY, Rotterdam in the new artistic environment of the bookshop and café, and in 2024 the CCC OD in Tours, France, will present a solo exhibition by the artist.