PRESS RELEASE
Heide Hinrichs, Tatiana Macedo, Aldwin van de Ven
tegenboschvanvreden brings the season to an end with a group
exhibition of work by three artists: a combination presented as a bundle
of contradictions, revolving around the notion of transformation.
Bits of paper, picked up off the street after countless vehicles have left
their tire marks on them, as sensitive gauges of our hectic world:
tatooed, with mud and grease, into the paper's surface are indefinable
landscapes. A glance into the rearview mirror, magically transformed
into concave and convex forms of papier-mâché or lost in immaterial
images where past meets present. Fragile-looking egg shells and
pieces of fabric, or cardboard boxes caught in each other's grasp.
Homemade bricks stacked on a woolen cloth.
In the work of German artist Heide Hinrichs (1976, Oldenburg) existing
objects gradually fall into place. Never are they arranged according to a
predetermined concept; on the basis of their own origins, the objects
themselves always persuade the artist to make adjustments. The
material used by Hinrichs usually has a history and, although that
context fascinates the artist, she unquestioningly yet effectively
provides existing facts with a new direction in order to show us, in her
poetic installations, that all matter is in a permanent state of flux.
A vacant lot in the metropolis Shanghai. A patch of urban wasteland,
where thousands of Chinese tourists get in and out of tour buses day
after day. As they swarm out to the city, the Portuguese artist Tatiana
Macedo (1981, Lisbon) walks between the empty buses with her camera.
From below she photographs the windows; like the urban surroundings,
the bus's interior takes on a new life via her eye. The seats lean back or
remain alertly upright, as though autonomous bodies, their upholstery
ranging from sober solid colors to gay patterns. Now and then, a stray
sneaker appears in a window. Some curtains hang in neat folds; others
are casually blown aside or sagging. Reflected in the windows of the
bus is time, the turning point between past and present, as the ancient
city melts into a cliché of modernity with its skyline of the world's
tallest buildings. Chairs and city, East and West, inside and outside,
passenger and observer: all of those levels in Macedo's photographs
give them the look of a theater that has been brought to a standstill.
To Aldwin van de Ven (1980, Den Bosch) the paintings that he creates
attest, above all, to a potential presence. Looming between the
foreground and background, in the various layers of paint—even in
scrapings and painted-out parts of the image—is the possible. The
sprouting of something from a sense, an observation or musing, a
consideration, a dream that vanishes once it appears and then surfaces
in another form, as a witticism, an effect, a classical image: in the
visual thought of Van de Ven, everything revolves around the principle of
restlessness. The images have a simple, laid-back, almost reduced
appearance but are deceptive, being hybrid, descriptive by definition
and independent of time and identity. Here the world flows in frozen
motion: vase, squid, duck, fishermen, boat, clown, corner, face, space.
Transformation upon transformation.
For further information, please contact the gallery.
July 16, 2011
Opening
saturday May 28
5 – 7 pm