04 march 2022, Flor Linckens
More highlights at Art Island
This weekend (3 to 5 March) you will have a unique opportunity to admire the work of dozens of artists at a World Heritage location: the fortified Fort Island in IJmuiden. The booths of the new Art Island art fair will be set up in a protected 19th century underground corridor system, which means that you certainly won’t have a white cube-like experience. The fair was started by the gallerist duo Brinkman & Bergsma. On GalleryViewer you will find an online catalogue with an overview of the exhibited works and in this article we highlight a number of remarkable works of art that will be on display.
Jacco Olivier, Flight, 2021, Galerie Ron Mandos
During Art Island, Galerie Ron Mandos is showing a series of animations, paintings and a piezo print by the Dutch artist Jacco Olivier. The award-winning artist — he was the recipient of the prestigious Jeanne Oosting Prize in 2019 for instance — occupies a unique position within the painterly landscape, because painting and video art come together in a remarkable way in his work. The maker started his artistic career by making paintings. To gain a better understanding of his practice, he started taking photographs of fragments of his work. When you watch these images in quick succession, it creates a painterly animation. It was the start of a series of video artworks in which figuration and abstraction often seem to merge seamlessly. Olivier completed a residency at the Rijksakademie and his work has been exhibited worldwide, including at the 56th Venice Biennale. You can find his work in the collections of Museum Voorlinden and the (Finnish-Polish-British) Zabludowicz Collection in London.
Jakup Ferri, Untitled, 2021, andriesse eyck galerie
In the booth of andriesse eyck galerie you will be surprised by a series of cheerful carpets by Jakup Ferri, who will also represent his native Kosovo at this year's Venice Biennale. The pixelated patterns of these carpets were designed by the artist's son, in the popular computer game Animal Crossing. Ferri grew up in Pristina in Kosovo and experienced a certain isolation from the western art world. But at the same time, that was also a time in which he gained a deep love for folk art and the craft that goes with that. These carpets were woven by hand in Kosovo and Albania. Ferri also completed a residency at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam and in 2008 he received a Buning Brongers Award. Many of his works deal with the nomadic existence that many artists lead, from residency to international exhibition and vice versa.
Fernando Sánchez Castillo, Tank Man, 2017, tegenboschvanvreden
In the booth of tegenboschvanvreden, you will find a work that feels quite topical: a miniature (30 cm tall) sculpture of the famous Tank Man, the man who stopped a column of tanks in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989, because he was brave enough to stand in front of it. He became the symbol of the resistance against a powerful system, an iconic image within our collective memory. In his work, the Spanish artist Fernando Sánchez Castillo deals with political power in relation to art, for example during the Spanish Civil War and the dictatorship that followed. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that this image touched him. Castillo has honoured him in various formats in his practice over the years. In a hyper-realistic and life-sized way, as in the work that is now part of the collection of the Centraal Museum, but also in the form of a large field that was filled with thousands of green toy soldier Tank Men.
