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PRESS RELEASE, Amstelveen 11 January, 2009
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Johannes Schwartz
'Passion'
27.03 - 24.05 2010
Johannes Schwartz (b. Munich, 1970) presents Passion, his new series of 17 large-format photographs.
Johannes Schwartz has created a new series of film-like moments, photographs of a sparse interior that has stayed still since the 1950s. Furniture and objects reflect the personality of someone who lived here for several decades. Plastic bags dispersed throughout the house have been documented in intimate fashion. Taking these bags as a subject has created a line of tension between décor and place and a documentary-like setting.
Schwartz plays with the conventions of appearance and disappearance, and their narrative dimensions, with photography as a means of expressing different imaginable realities. Our curiosity is immediately awakened by the unseen contents of the bags. At the same time, the carefully chosen fall of light evokes an atmosphere reminiscent of paintings by Johannes Vermeer: old, bygone times in contrast with the ‘chemical’ colours of the plastic. Although Schwartz's interior photographs are pure registrations of a found situation, they seem like the results of a meticulously staged scene.
Schwartz's artistic career took off in 1998 with interior and exterior photographs of children's huts, followed by photographs of interiors for the blind, psychiatric treatment rooms and hunting lodges.
In 2007, Johannes Schwartz presented his ‘Paintbox’ series, which won the Cobra Art Prize Amstelveen.
There will be a publication available.
Note for the press:
For further information and visual material on ‘Passion’, contact Lieke Fijen, , tel. +31-(0)20 5475038.
On-request instructions are also available for downloading images of artworks.
See also: www.vanzoetendaal.nl
PRESS RELEASE, Amstelveen 15 December, 2009
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Rob Voerman
Human Comfort
30.10 2010 - 30.05 2010
Human Comfort is Rob Voerman's first one-man museum exhibition in the Netherlands. In this extensive retrospective, Voerman shows work from 1998 to the present, including a new installation, Cinema, created exclusively for the Cobra Museum presentation.
In the last decade, Rob Voerman has built up an extensive body of installations and works on paper. He creates diverse forms of fictional architecture, in which the romantic process of building one�fs own structures and environments is contrasted to destruction, terror and threat. Voerman's societies are built from the leftovers of a dystopia.
Rob Voerman already enjoys wide international recognition. He has recently exhibited in London, Vienna and Berlin, and his work is found in important international collections. The Museum of Modern Art in New York has recently purchased new work by Voerman, as have the Generali Foundation and the Deutsche Bank.
The Cobra Museum exhibition includes a variety of smaller and larger installations, dating from 2001 to the present. It further includes numerous prints and watercolours, as well as separate film rooms. In one of these, viewers can experience a sculpture project in the centre of London. Three major installations can be accessed by visitors.
Cinema
Especially for this exhibition, Voerman developed a large, new installation. It is a white, formal construction, whose structure is reminiscent of a villa. Inside and around part of the construction is an apparently improvised shelter, built of wood, cardboard and magenta-coloured glass. The construction is comprised of an entrance that extends off to the sides into two other constructions. Walking straight from the entrance, visitors arrive in a small projection room, where a film is being shown. It shows a wooden construction that extends into the projection room itself in a perfectly natural fashion, as though we were physically looking into the entrance to a tunnel. Inside the installation, a clear contrast is created between the projection room and the other spaces. To a degree, Cinema makes us think of shelters constructed by homeless people, but the projection room is extremely threatening and dark. Because of the reddish glass, the other spaces evoke associations with a lounge or a church. Comfort, a sense of security, threat and anxiety all engage in a fascinating symbiosis.
Rob Voerman (b. Deventer, NL, 1966)
Rob Voerman's architectural constructions are built from organic, tattered materials: cardboard, discarded wood, found objects, etc. His watercolours, prints and installations all present nonexistent architecture in remote or urban environments. The constructions evoke a strong sense of alienation, based on associations with our contemporary living environment. Fictional neighbourhoods, after a catastrophe for example, have been taken over by these constructions. The materials are reworked in apparently ad hoc fashion into models with both utopian and sinister atmosphere. Romanticism is embellished and combined with the dark traits of terror and rebellion.
Voerman's architecture is impossible and non-functional. His hybrid structures are built from inadequate, impermanent and porous materials. Like a virus, decay and corrosion eat away at the foundations. What remains are the ruins of modernity. Where architecture defines and demarcates a space, Rob Voerman�fs models are part of an indeterminate space that offers nothing to hold on to. His urban landscapes and industrial sketches bear the traces of the history of mankind in the same way that Italo Calvino speaks of untouched places that refer to a lost, imagined past.
The post-apocalyptic world of Rob Voerman is filled with floating contradictions: archaic versus futuristic, romanticism and fear, nature versus technology, utopia versus dystopia, order and chaos. Domed or elongated forms evoke associations with ancient places of refuge and shelter: caves, huts and churches. But these architectural visions refer to alien, technologically advanced, complex life forms. It is in such undefined spaces that we seek shelter and security: the spectrum to which the title refers.
The work of Rob Voerman does not merely possess a dark side. It points to a new approach to our living environment, where people instinctively reinforce one another, where they speak of improvisation and innovation. It is the same context that includes investment in new energy sources and cradle-to-cradle thinking.
Where Constant Nieuwenhuys created his New Babylon as an achievable utopia in the 1950s and 60s, Voerman now creates informal, improvised architecture, in part generated from his criticism of existing cultural, social and financial systems. Today's reality shows the reverse side of urbanization and unshakable faith in progress through technology. The dilemmas of the fictional society that Rob Voerman investigates in his unique, personal way are consequently poignant and very relevant.
Publication
Late January will see the release of the artist's book: Rob Voerman, Aftermath: Installations, Sculptures, Works on Paper. The publication offers many points of departure and perspectives for exploring the work of Rob Voerman. Authors include Sabine Folie, director of the Generali Foundation, Vienna, art historian and author of countless monographs and articles; David van der Leer, art and architecture historian and assistant curator for architecture at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, who examines Voerman's work by way of architectural issues; and Tim Nolet, art historian at the University of Amsterdam, who explores relationships between Voerman�fs work and developments in technology and philosophy.
The publication is supported by the Netherlands' Foundation for Fine Art, Design and Architecture, in association with Upstream Gallery. (www.valiz.nl ISBN 978-90-78088-40-0, in Dutch and English).
Note for the press:
For further information and visual material on Human Comfort, contact Lieke Fijen, , tel. +31-(0)20 5475038. On-request instructions are also available for downloading images of artworks.
See also: www.robvoerman.nl and www.upstreamgallery.nl
Cobra Museum of Modern Art / Sandbergplein 1 1181 ZX Amstelveen / Tel. +31-(0)20 5475050 / Tues-Sun, 11:00am-5:00pm / www.cobra-museum.nl
PRESS RELEASE, Amstelveen 6 January, 2009
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Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani
‘Spelling Dystopia’
30.01 2010 - 25.04 2010
From 30 January Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani exhibit their latest video installation ‘Spelling Dystopia’ (2009) at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art. Their intriguing film ‘Spelling Dystopia’ was only shown before in Berlin.
Several places that were once hallmarks, centers of political culture, avant-garde art, and social developments, have become blind spots in contemporary society. Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani want to bring them back to today's consciousness in their altered state: not utopian, not obsolete, but rather not yet redefined.
The film ‘Spelling Dystopia’ focuses on the public perception of the uninhabited island Hashima near Nagasaki, which has a vivid history. Hashima has been an important location for Japanese coal-mining until 1974. It is a man-made artificial island, based on the use of concrete. During the World War II it was a work camp for war prisoners from Korea and China. In the 60s it became the most dense place on earth. With a size of only 160 x 450 m the island was inhabited by over 5000 people in its best times, working in the Mitsubishi-owned coalmine. The density of the population was higher than in Tokyo's most crowded parts today. From 1974 the island was abandoned. In the year 2000 it became the film location of a science fiction blockbuster ‘Battle Royale’. The younger generation started to know the place mostly from movies, mangas and video games.
Fischer and El Sani focus on the transfer of collective memories. In ‘Spelling Dystopia’ they combine the memories of a former inhabitant of the island with the narration of two high school students who recall fragments of the science fiction movie ‘Battle Royale’. Thereby, the island appears almost as their fantasy, an imaginary playground for their games, where various images and layers of reality and fiction already got in a state of mingling.
Nina Fischer (1965, Emden) and Maroan el Sani (1966, Duisberg) work together since 1993. They live and work in Berlijn and Sapporo (Japan).
Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani
SPELLING DYSTOPIA, HD, 16:9, 2 channel video installation, stereo, 17:16 min. Production Still, 2009
Courtesy the artists and Galerie EIGEN + ART, Leipzig/Berlin
Note for the press:
For further information and visual material on ‘Spelling Dystopia’, contact Lieke Fijen, , tel. +31-(0)20 5475038. On-request instructions are also available for downloading images of artworks.
See also: www.fisherelsani.net and www.eigen-art.com
PRESS RELEASE, Amstelveen 16 November, 2009
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Piet Ouborg: Soloist
Insight into a Pioneering Oeuvre
12 December, 2009 - 14 March, 2010
The Cobra Museum presents highlights of the pioneering work of a forerunner and innovator in Dutch art. In the Netherlands, Piet Ouborg was well ahead of his time. Ouborg’s work gave visual art a radically new identity.
This extensive exhibition comprises a selection of Piet Ouborg’s masterpieces, including drawings, gouaches and paintings from all the periods of his career, with special emphasis on his later work. These works show how Ouborg - always guided by his own personal compass - developed as an artist, from his first figurative, surrealistic works in the 1930s to his visionary abstract painting from 1947 to 1950 that led to his breakthrough. With this work, Ouborg was a frontrunner in a perception of painting that the Cobra artists had yet to make their own.
The work of Piet Ouborg is currently generating considerable interest both nationally and internationally. In the context of our new century and after a long hiatus, we take in new look back at the legacy of one of the Netherlands’ most important modern artists. The most recent museum exhibition devoted to Ouborg’s work was more than seven years ago.
This exhibition presents an exclusive selection of about a hundred masterpieces, carefully selected from numerous collections, including the artist’s estate. It is also exceptional that this exhibition and the catalogue that accompanies it, makes a significant contribution to knowledge and understanding of this artist, including a previously unnoticed scientific source of inspiration.
Piet Ouborg (Dordrecht, 1893- the Hague, 1956)
In 1916, at the age of 23, Piet Ouborg moved to what was then the Dutch East Indies and taught drawing there. When he was 30, he spent a year back in the Netherlands and became familiar with the French modernists. He intensified his didactic drawing skills and returned to Java. His work was first exhibited in the Netherlands in 1932. In 1938, when Ouborg was 45, he and his family moved back to the Netherlands.
The 1930s
In the interbellum years, Dutch museums were still rarely exhibiting modern art. Ouborg was unaware of the few artists who were producing surrealistic art in the Netherlands between 1930 in 1932, when he painted several abstract dream images, followed by anthropomorphic and biomorphic beings in drawings that were rich in fantasy, as well as expressively painted explosions and hushed landscapes. This work would now be referred to as Surrealist. This series of dream images was primarily created on Java, far removed from the effervescent Paris art scene, where Surrealism was at its apex. Ouborg kept abreast of these developments by way of French magazines, through which he became acquainted with the work of Breton, Ernst, Miró, Tanguy, Picasso and De Chirico. Stylistically, there were parallels between Ouborg’s work and that of several surrealist artists. The oval shapes in Ouborg's dreamscapes have similar weight to Jean Arp’s ‘navels’. The spirit of Tanguy’s alienating landscapes, with their characteristic, surrealistic atmosphere of eroticism and decay, can be felt in Ouborg’s landscapes. His explosions might seem to refer to the threatening winds of war in some of Max Ernst’s paintings. Both the abstract and the figurative variations of Surrealism are present in Piet Ouborg’s work.
Ouborg was in these years at the very heart of the rich Indonesian culture, a culture that was only available to Parisian artists by way of ethnographic collections and objects. Ouborg’s awareness that masks and shadow puppets were tools for reaching the subconscious intensified. His investigation into the subconscious or the surreal was self-evident - he had visions and feverish dreams and was receptive to magic and spirituality. From the beginning, Ouborg collected masks and spontaneous children's drawings, all of which indicated that Ouborg’s personal surrealism developed in a perfectly natural way. By the time he brought it back to the Netherlands, he was well ahead of his time.
The 1940s and 50s
Piet Ouborg did not develop his interests as part of a group of like-minded artists, but by finding inspiration in the world in which he lived. He described that world as an endless flow of images and symbols. Ouborg shunned fashionable stylistic conventions. It is striking that after 1938, when Ouborg returned to the Netherlands, he would be resuming his pre-war experiments at the same time that museums were trying to make up for lost time in presenting modern art.
Ouborg’s spirituality was rooted in a universal acceptance of a primeval source for the expression of life. The forms of expression that this generated - by primitive cultures, children and ‘nonconformists’ - were things that the young Cobra artists recognized when they saw the work of Piet Ouborg. In 1947, Anton Rooskens and Theo Wolvecamp sought a radical new way of painting, one that the Dutch Experimentalists had yet to make their own. Between 1947 in 1950, Ouborg’s quest for new possibilities of expression led to a breakthrough. He developed a visionary abstract style of painting in which all his experiments from previous years were incorporated into a powerful and colourful visual language.
In 1950, Piet Ouborg was awarded the Jacob Maris Prize for his drawing, Father and Son. The event has always been remembered because it was landmark event in the history of Dutch art. The commotion that it generated demonstrated an overwhelming general ignorance of contemporary and modern art, and a lack of knowledge about abstract art, which was associated with insanity and considered a rip-off. It was comparable to the furious reactions to the Cobra artists. Museum curators who presented modern art in the 1950s and the art critics who wrote about the work were the first to recognize the qualities of Ouborg’s work. That appreciation was not only confirmed by his being awarded the Jacob Maris Prize, but also by international recognition.
New Insight
The work of Piet Ouborg is almost always described in terms of feelings: its leanings towards ‘something higher’, contact with the unconscious, or the primal strength of the primitive. In addition to this, Ouborg was not insensitive to the rational mind. Amongst his possessions were found pages from the Lehrbuch der allgemeinen pathologische Anatomie. Ouborg had drawn into the illustrations of microscopic images. Pen in hand, he had followed the precise lines of diseased organic tissue. He made branches from them, adding tentacles and making connections between them. In investigating his post-war work, it is certainly worthwhile to include his hitherto secret meetings with the sciences.
Book Publication
The exhibition will be accompanied by a richly illustrated book, published by Waanders Uitgevers and the Cobra Museum of Modern Art, with extensive illuminating texts by art historians Véronique Baar, Katja Weitering (curator for the Cobra Museum), Annelies Haase and Bert Jansen (ISBN 9789040086335).
Principal sponsor of the exhibition:
Note for the press:
For additional information and visual material, please contact Lieke Fijen, , tel. 31 (0)20 5475038. On request, instructions are available for directly downloading visual material.
Cobra Museum of Modern Art / Sandbergplein 1 1181 ZX Amstelveen / Tel. 020 5475050 / open Tuesdays-Sunday 11:00-5:00 / for guided tours, call 31 (0)20 5475031
