Yvonne Dröge Wendel's work is a passionate search for the conditions under which objects and people relate to one another. Her approach investigates how objects and people are forming, re-forming, corrupting and constituting one another. From showing things as they are, Dröge Wendel moves towards showing things that are evolving, open ended and unknown in themselves. Materials that previously provided the solid ground to stand on, become fluid, shifting towards a more unstable and fragile world of ideas and performative acts.
In her exhibition at Lumen Travo Gallery, Dröge Wendel introduces two new works: "An Alphabet of a Practice" and “Ideas grow better on bigger paper”.
“An Alphabet of a Practice” consists of five large glass-sheets with laser cut line drawings. This series embodies the transition from concrete to abstract, with the organic shapes of the first panels gradually mutating into more abstract compositions.
This same visual evolution is witnessed in the photo series “An Alphabet of a Practice”, in which several stills taken from the film “Furniture of a Think Tank” by Dan Walwin are juxtaposed to the drawings highlighting the actions behind the images.
“Ideas grow better on bigger paper – to form, to be informed” is a sculptural work in which two huge paper sheets fill up the gallery space, moving from being just plain paper sheets to three dimensional forms. This work questions how far the material, the paper itself, inspires the formation of thought and at which moment these papers gain just enough qualities to be seen as some thing.
The works “To be a worker” and “To be powerful” present casts of hands attached to wooden sticks: this playful installation shifts the focus on the specific way we touch objects and how consequently specific feelings, meanings and beings arise.
The installation of drawings “Siphonophore” finds its inspiration in the homonymous animal. A siphonophore can be seen as the biggest animals of the planet, but it is actually a colony of individual parts that together compose a living thing. Like a reverse puzzle, this installation was created as a drawing on the paper formats A8, A7, A6, A5, A4, A3, A2 paper and, later on, deconstructed into pieces, each piece of paper shows a detail of the animal’s silhouette.
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Yvonne Dröge Wendel (1961) lives and works in Amsterdam. She trained at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and was an artist in residence at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam (1993-1994) and Delfina Studios in London (2002- 2003). She publishes art books, features in solo and group exhibitions, and creates artworks in public space. She is head of the department of Fine Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. In 1994 she won the second Prix de Rome and in 2016 she was the laureate of the prestigious Dr. A.H. Heineken Prize for Art.
Recent exhibitions include To Be To Gather (solo), Stroom, Den Hague (2022), Jam Extra - Forest destroyed due to a vast amount of strawberry jam, Paltz Biennale Soest (2021), LIEBES DING - OBJECT LOVE Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen (2020), Dismantling the Scaffold, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2018), Furniture for a Think Tank, Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven (2018), Paint it Soft, Schunck Glaspaleis, Heerlen (2017), What does art do at hospitals? KØS Museum of Art in Public Spaces, Koge/Copenhagen (2017).
This exhibition was made with the friendly assistance of
René Welker (casts of hands on sticks), Isis Verberk & Birna
Björnsdottir (struggling and performing with large sheets of paper and varnish) and Esther de Vries ( line drawings on glass panels).
"An Alphabet of a Practice" is running until 25 February, 2023.
Photo credits: Giovanni Nardi