12 august 2021, Flor Linckens
An experimental photographer, an expressive painter and an artist with an eye for detail
Until August 28, gallery dudokdegroot will be devoted to flowers: on the one hand the still lifes that photographer Leendert Blok captured a century ago, on the other hand the watercolours and paintings by Eva Räder and Ina van Zyl.
Since 2017, gallery owner Jedithja de Groot has been responsible for the ‘Beeldrijm’ (Image Rhyme) section in the Parool newspaper every Friday, in which she visually rhymes an image from the historic Spaarnestad Photo Collection with an (often topical) image from contemporary art and culture. The Spaarnestad Photo collection consists of more than 13 million photos, making it a significant record of Dutch history. De Groot has been working with the collection since 2007, long before she founded the gallery dudokdegroot in 2015, together with Nicole Dudok van Heel. The current gallery exhibition shows a recent collaboration with the Spaarnestad Photo Collection: a series of special editions of the work of Leendert Blok. These new prints were made using the Dutch photographer's original glass negatives, autochromes and spectracolors.
Leendert Blok | Collectie Spaarnestad, Gladiolus Nanus Charm (1927), 2021, galerie dudokdegroot.
Blok settled in Lisse in the 1920s, where he responded to a call from local bulb growers: there was a great need for colour photography for international flower buyers. Colour photography was not yet widespread at that time and it was quite a labour-intensive process. The first - and at that time, the only commercially viable - colour process was the autochrome, a technique that was invented by the famous Lumière brothers. The autochrome was a coloured slide on glass, which came about because the glass was coated with millions of microscopic particles of tinted potato starch, mixed with fine carbon powder. An applied layer of shellac protected the slide from the next layer: the gelatin emulsion. This technique was especially suitable for projects that allowed for a long exposure time, which excluded moving objects. Yet is was perfect for capturing static flowers. Blok was always experimenting and in 1927, he developed a new technique that produced a much sharper image: Spectracolor, based on three transparent exposed film layers mounted on top of each other, in the colours magenta, cyan and yellow.
Eva Räder, Lucid Flowers II, 2021, galerie dudokdegroot.
Artists Ina van Zyl and Eva Räder share a fascination for the work of this photographer. The gallery invited them to make a selection from Leendert Blok's oeuvre, which has only partly survived. These photos were printed in original format and are presented alongside a number of recent watercolours by Ina van Zyl and several paintings by Eva Räder. As a result, the viewer gets to see three different interpretations of flowers; Blok's experimental techniques, Räder's expressive paintings and Van Zyl's zoomed-in watercolours.
The exhibition can be seen in gallery dudokdegroot in Amsterdam until August 28.
