The gallery season was officially opened last weekend. Below, you will find a brief overview of a number exhibitions that are currently on show in Rotterdam, The Hague, Brussels, Goes and Velp.
Since last weekend, Cokkie Snoei stelt Cokkie Snoei has been exhibiting work by South African photographer Pieter Hugo. For his recent series “La Cucaracha”, he recorded four trips to Mexico that he undertook in the past two years. During those trips, he created powerful and iconic portraits of various groups of people. For instance, he captured an asylum seeker on his way to the United States, a young bride with an iguana - a Mexican symbol of patience, understanding and goodness -, an undercover police officer and an older generation of non-gender-conforming people. Pieter Hugo's work has previously been shown in Tate Modern and in the Fotomuseum The Hague and his work is part of collections of important museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the V&A Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, the J Paul Getty Museum, the Deutsche Börse Group and Huis Marseille.
Frank Taal Galerie has programmed a duo presentation by Diederick van Kleef and Mike Ottink. The collaboration between these artists began in 1998, when Ottink walked into a special art bookshop slash gallery near the Sarphatipark in Amsterdam, which happened to be a business by Van Kleef. Ottink was looking for an obscure book about Derek Bailey, an avant-garde jazz-noise guitarist, a question that didn’t pose a problem for Van Kleef. Now, their work can be seen together in the exhibition"Abstract Realism or Algorithmic Magic”..
In Chrysalid Gallery you will find a duo exhibition by the Russian artist Natalia Grezina and the Italian artist Samuele Canestrari. For this exhibition, they collaborated with curator Marth von Loeben. Samuele Canestrari's melancholic graphite drawings are inspired by Christian rituals surrounding death and, more specifically, about how we deal with the human body after death has occurred. Natalia Grezina makes, among other things, embroidered works that she uses to bring about a reconciliation between society, the individual and nature. The importance of water within nature is also a central theme within her work, a theme that is only going to become more relevant in the future.
In PHOEBUS Rotterdam fifteen artists have reflected on the concept of time during corona, a concept that these artists have all experienced differently in the past period.
In Galerie Helder the almost neon-coloured works by Bas Wiegmink contrast with the mostly black and white artworks of Sigrid van Woudenberg. She creates the dark, atmospheric and almost cinematic works with the help of black Siberian chalk. She works very physically and chooses her own memories as her main source of inspiration, always wondering about how human memory works. In the paintings of Bas Wiegmink, urban structures and natural elements interact with each other, on a background of neon grids that are reminiscent of the 1982 film 'Tron'. It often remains a bit mysterious where those plants come from, exactly. They often seem to float in space..
In Galerie Ramakers you can see the work of the Belgian artist Willy de Sauter alongside work by Dutch artist Jan van Munster. De Sauter makes monochrome works with line patterns that carry a subtle critical message. De Sauter: “It is an apparently visual void, that I use to confront the viewer. For me, this work also carries a subtle critique of the mass consumption of images in our society.” Van Munster's work often focuses on energy and opposing forces, such as the symmetrical magnet constellation that you can now see on the floor in Galerie Ramakers. The lightning-like lines of his neon works are based on an EEG of his brain - an EEG records the brain's electrical activity. He did not have these tests performed out of medical necessity, but out of curiosity. Van Munster's brain was measured in various physical states and the results of these experiments are still an inspiration for his work
Livingstone Gallery used the weekend during the opening of the gallery season to give us a preview of the work they will be showing in the near future at art fairs and in exhibitions. For example, from 10 September they will be exhibiting their work in a booth at the Positions Berlin Art Fair, in a hangar at Tempelhof Airport. You can still take a look at this preview on hier bekijken.
Brussel, Goes en Velp
In LMNO in Brussels you can get acquainted with the work of French artist Adrien Lucca. "Using physics and colour management, I follow a methodology in which the interaction between colours and light is key." This combination of light, colour and science is shown in interesting ways in the work of Lucca, who also teaches the subject of colour at the École nationale supérieure des Arts visuels in La Cambre. Lucca examines, for example, how our perception of colour is determined by invisible mechanisms in the light itself.
Galerie van den Berge in Goes is celebrating an anniversary this autumn: the gallery will have its 30th birthday. To give shape to these celebrations, the gallery has planned three exhibitions under the banner "Reasons to be Cheerful", the first of which is now on view in the gallery. In these exhibitions, the gallery’s artists are being given the spotlight. For this first show, those artists will be Maurice van Tellingen, Frank Halmans, Paul Gees, Nanda Rung, Wolfgang Ellenrieder, Sybille Pattscheck and Raf Thys.
In O-68 in Velp, you get a chance to see how the artists Harrie Gerritz, Marena Seeling and Isolde Venrooy have translated various landscapes into an abstract visual language. What essence do they find in the original images? And what new contexts do they create in their new portrayals of these landscapes?