SOFACQ Gallery
THE NETHERLANDS
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Atelier van Lieshout
1963 - Ravenstein
Atelier Van Lieshout is the studio founded by sculptor, painter and visionary Joep van Lieshout. After graduating at the Rotterdam Art Academy Van Lieshout quickly rose to fame with projects that travelled between the world of easy-clean design and the non-functional area of art: sculpture and installations, buildings and furniture, utopias and dystopias.
In 1995, Van Lieshout founded his studio and has been working solely under the studio’s name ever since. The studio moniker exists in Van Lieshout’s practice as a methodology toward undermining the myth of the artistic genius. Over the past three decades, Van Lieshout has established a multidisciplinary practice that produces works on the borders between art, design, and architecture. By investigating the thin line between manufacturing art and mass-producing functional objects, he seeks to find the boundaries between fantasy and function, between fertility and destruction.
Van Lieshout dissects systems, be it society as a whole or the human body; he experiments, looks for alternatives, takes exhibitions as experiments for recycling, and has even declared an independent state in the port of Rotterdam AVL-Ville (2001)—a free state in the Rotterdam harbour, with a minimum of rules, a maximum of liberties, and the highest degree of autarky. All of these activities are conducted within Van Lieshout’s signature style of provocation—be it political or material.
Van Lieshout combines an imaginative aesthetic and ethic with a spirit of entrepreneurship; his work has motivated movements in the fields of architecture and ecology, and has been internationally celebrated, exhibited, and published. His works share a number of recurring themes, motives, and obsessions: systems, power, autarky, life, sex, and death—each of these trace the human individual in the face of a greater whole such as his well-known work the Domestikator (2015). This sculpture caused controversy before even being placed at the Louvre in Jardin de Tuilleries, but was adopted by Centre Pompidou where it was shown during FiAC (2017).
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Atelier Van Lieshout, Minimal Shelter, 2012.
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Atelier Van Lieshout, Kiss, 2013.
Fiberglass, 178 x 77 x 131 cm.
Atelier Van Lieshout, Prick, 2008.
Fiberglass, polyester.
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Atelier Van Lieshout, Bas, 2008.
Polyurethane foam, polyurea coating, wood, 50 x 60 x 170 cm.
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Atelier Van Lieshout, Black Bag (standing) Thomo, 2008.
Polyester, 173 x 77 x 75cm.
David bade
1970 - willemstad
David Benjamin Bade is a Dutch sculptor, installation artist, painter and draftsman. Bade studied from 1987 to 1991 at the teacher training (crafts and drawing) of the Hogeschool Holland in Diemen and then visited Ateliers '63 in Haarlem until 1993. Bade received the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1993 and in 2010 he won the Sikkens Prize, an irregular award from the Sikkens Foundation. He was visiting professor at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Bremen from 2000 to 2003. In 2006, together with Tirzo Martha, he founded the Instituto Buena Bista (IBB) in Curaçao, both of which are directors. The IBB provides an artist in residency program, organizes a large number of cultural projects and offers training opportunities for local artists. Bade was a jury member of the Rotterdam Dolf Hanse Prize in 2016.
Bade David, De pot verwijt de ketel,2018.
Sculpture & Painting.
Folkert de jong
1972 - Alkmaar
Mutants, zombies, monsters, maniacs, skulls, guns, skeletons:
Folkert de Jong's (Alkmaar, 1972) universe is dark, morbid and absurd. In the sculptures he makes, he refers to both history, sculptural tradition and to pop culture themes such as horror, comics and fantasy. In contrast to classic materials such as bronze and marble, De Jong works with everyday materials such as styrofoam and polyurethane foam.
Materials that also determine De Jong's characteristic use of color: baby blue, the color of styrofoam, and dirty yellow, the color of polyurethane foam. During his residency at the Rijksakademie of visual arts in Amsterdam, De Jong becomes fascinated by “people who are totally out of their minds”. He is mesmerized by the work of Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley and watches movies about psychopaths a lot: "I thought about how a person could go so far in his fantasies that reality and fiction overlap."
Initially, De Jong creates what you might call "environments": arrangements of sculptures that form a world that you can wander through as a visitor. An example of this is The Ilemauzer (2000) - the title is derived from a character from a seventeenth-century story about witch hunting - a project realized in the Vleeshal in Middelburg. In 2001 De Jong shows The Iceman Cometh at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (SMBA). From that moment on, he focuses more on the classical sculptural approach, in which you are more a spectator of the work, instead of entering it and being part of it. De Jong wants to seduce and confront his audience; in addition to the grim and dark character of his work, it also contains a lot of humor and satire. They are bizarre, adventurous groups of images in which he is a director and plays on the feelings of his audience.
De Jong studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy (1994-1996) and at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (1998-2000), both in Amsterdam. In 2003 he won the Prix de Rome. Work by De Jong has been shown in Peres Projects (Los Angeles), Upstream Gallery (Amsterdam), Galerie Fons Welters (Amsterdam), the Vleeshal (Middelburg) and SMBA (Amsterdam).
De Jong Folkert - Untitled
White box, glass, 3 coloured guns in foam - 40 x 150 x 90 cm
ann de vries
1977 - The hague
Anne de Vries lives and works in Amsterdam and Berlin.Her work comprises a wide range of media, from digital photography and sculpture to new media technology. They bear witness to our increasing entanglement with technology – its material and symbolic origins, our sense of the world as part of the universe and our expanding understanding of the laws of physics through different media. In which new technologies influence our perception of the world and its socio-political implications.
Aquarius by Ann De Vries is a calendar presenting every single day of the 2150 year-long time period, starting with 1962-02-04 it continues into the year 4114. With the total length of 42 meters, this calendar can be exhibited in different ways, rolled or enrolled as much as fits in the exhibition space.
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De Vries Ann, All days of Aquarius, 2011.
Solvent print on vinyl, 188 x 420 cm.
Mandy den elzen
1981 -
Particularly interested in tactile properties of organic structures, Mandy den Elzen brings to light the aesthetic side of natural wonders. Her practice may be characterised as combining intense and precise fieldwork with developing comprehensive and meticulous preservation methods.
Intrigued by nature’s ingenuity, Mandy den Elzen separates organic material from its original functions and transforms its raw forms into displayable and compelling artworks. Employing a scientific-like approach, the artist rigorously selects internal organs of various animals and subjects them to a series of scrupulous actions. As a result, the organic materials alter their appearance and become unique and enigmatic objects seducing the viewers with their extraordinary shape, texture, tactility, and colour. Functioning like a microcosm encased in glass,
Mandy den Elzen’s artwork sparks interest in its origins and reminds viewers of Renaissance cabinets of curiosities. The assemblies of collectable wonders that she creates not only manifest artist’s passion for nature and its aesthetics but also stimulate viewers’ imagination and encourage contemplation of hidden aspects of living organisms. While primarily focusing on the physical properties of diverse materials, Mandy den Elzen’s approach unites the ones of an artist, morphologist and taxonomist.
Depriving inner organs of their original biological functions, the artist reveals their aesthetic qualities and juxtaposes sublimity and beauty of nature with cultural connotations of distance and aversion. What remains vital to her when dealing with the organic material is the full control of and hands-on commitment to the creative process. She personally explores slaughterhouses and fish markets, selects specimens boasting uncommon characteristics and applies an exceptional skill set to turn them into captivating objects. Intertwining biology with art and her artwork sheds light on Mother Nature’s hidden treasures and conveys fascination with the natural phenomena typical of the Romantic era.
Mandy den Elzen’s works have been exhibited internationally and are included in numerous public and private collections. She is also the recipient of the 2015 Mondriaan Fund Talent Development Grant for Emerging Artists.
Den Elzen Mandy, The Morphology of Fish, 2016.
38 Fish gills under glass bells, variable dimensions.
Pieter engels
1938 - Rosmalen
Pieter Engels (Rosmalen, 1938) questions and shows with his work the mechanisms of the visual arts. His works are subversive in nature, and often witty and ironic in tone. In 1964 Engels established the English Product Organization (EPO). A company with a director - Pieter Engels - and a sales manager - Engels' alter ego Simon Es. Engels uses all kinds of resources that belong to a company: a showroom, catalogs, advertising brochures and associated language.
EPO sells, among other things, repaired furniture, letter pieces and wonder events. The first category also includes the 'repaired chairs': sawed-through chairs that are then assembled in a new way with hinges. Letter pieces are wall objects with folding panels on which plastic plates are attached with short texts such as "hello" and "come on." The wonder events are services for which you pay English: for example cutting a banknote, having a short conversation or damaging your car ("ENGLISH DAMAGES YOUR CAR BEAUTIFULLY, price: from fl. 100, -"). The wonder events ask us as a spectator to what extent we are willing to participate.
If we pay Engels to damage our car, we are partly responsible for stretching the boundaries of what art is and can be. Text and language play an important role in his oeuvre. The situation plates are an example of this. Black plates with white letters to read: "hang this plate near a plug" or "hang this plate near a door".
Another example is the work The absence of a painting framed by the absence of this painting (2009). An empty picture frame frames another empty picture frame. On the inner frame is a text plate affixed with "the absence of a painting", on the outer frame is "the absence of a painting framed by the absence of this painting". Modern Art (Seascape) Piece (The Clothes of the Emperor) (1967) also frames the void. It is a frame without a canvas in the middle. The addition of "The Clothes of the Emperor" is striking. A double bottom. The Emperor's clothes, which is something that everyone believes in, but which does not really exist.
Engels undermines and confirms the right to exist of art by subjecting it to an investigation. "The beauty of the lie is that she knows the truth," said Engels. It is a sentence that is very clear in itself, but that you still have to think about. He seems paradoxical. This is characteristic of the Engels working method. By shedding new light on what we consider normal, he tilts our perception.
His works are, as it were, interventions that challenge us to think about what makes art art. Pieter Engels studied at the Royal School of Visual Arts in Den Bosch (1955-1958) and at the Rijksakademie of Visual Arts in Amsterdam (1958-1962). Works by Engels have been shown in Museum Jan Cunen (Oss), the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Martin van Zomeren (Amsterdam).
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Engels Pieter, Situationplate (hang this plate near a door), 1968.
Wood, formica, 45 x 30 cm.
anneke eussen
1978 - NL
Anneke Eussen is a contemporary artist in fields of drawing, sculpture and photography and installation. Eussen was born in Netherlands 1978 and currently lives and works in Berlin. Eussen won Young Artists On The Road Award in 2003 and was nominated with Parkstad Limburg Prijs 2004
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Eussen Anneke, Because of you, 2014.
Cardboard, marker, pencil, burning marks, framed in wood behind glass, 188 x 198 cm.
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Eussen Anneke, Untitled, 2015.
Car window, chain, match stick, twig, nail, paint, 66 x 22 cm.
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Eussen Anneke, Porcelain Boys, 2005.
Chinese bone porcelain (1 figure), 210 x 50 x 50 cm, variable.
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Eussen Anneke, We are one but not the same, 2014.
Small branch, metal handles cut in two parts, necklace, 16 x 60 x 12 cm.
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Eussen Anneke, You don't understand me, 2014.
Diptych of old, marble plate, from a washing table with holes, verticaly placed and exactly replicated copy, with two variations of line drawings in elastic, 2 x (68 x 39 x 2 cm).
theun govers
Theun Gover’s style is clear and individualistic. On the basis of a personal, spatial logic, Govers creates abandoned, frequently dark, spaces. In them, reality appears to have been banished, literally painted out, or to be visible merely in between the many grid lines. His paintings consist of architectural patterns. Lines, surfaces, rasters and their perspectival division evoke three-dimensionality and appear to function in their own right.
The patterns act as corners of spaces; perspective transforms a cube into an interior. Govers’s compositions are reinforced by, and go hand in hand with, his working methods and use of materials: he paints exclusively on panels, made of triplex, MDF or wooden planks. This enables him to carry on sanding, and adding or removing layers of varnish, to the very last moment. Likewise, it is not exceptional for Govers to dismantle his works when they appear finished and to reassemble the separate planks to make a new painting.
As often applies in Govers’s work, the result produces a certain calm and acquiescence, yet accompanied by tension. In a literal sense, tension exists between the use of materials, between the different layers in the work.
But there is also tension generated by the few references to the outside world, the implied presence of human beings. In spite of the frequently mundane nature of these references, such as a bed or party streamers, in the context of the painting they acquire a strange, uneasy quality, and seem out of place. The geometrical spaces created by Theun Govers lay bare the rules of illusion that govern the painting, but at the same time they conceal a secret that will not easily reveal itself.
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Govers Theun, Small Serie (1a), 2016.
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Govers Theun, Small Serie (1b), 2016.
Niek kortekaas
1958 - NL
Designer and director Niek Kortekaas (° 1958) finished his studies in drawing and painting, design and photography at the Academy of Visual Arts in Rotterdam.
Since 1985 he has worked continuously as a designer for theater and dance companies and as a production designer for various film projects. In addition, Kortekaas has also organized various exhibitions and is furthermore working as an illuminator and director.
He currently teaches scenography at POPOK (Postgraduate Performing Arts, Department of Theater Design), a postgraduate that was founded by Kortekaas together with Jan Verswyfeld and Jean Marie Feviez.
Niek Kortekaas received a Johnny Kraaikamp Musical Award for best creative performance, two Flemish Musicalawards for best direction and best creative performance for 'Pippi Longstocking the very strongest musical', The Charlotte Köhler prize for scenography, and the SABAM prize for applied arts and photography.
Because of the fascination for the crossover and interfaces between scenography and architecture, Niek Kortekaas is increasingly active in the field of exhibitions and museum installations.
In addition to his work as a scenographer, Kortekaas has developed into a versatile director. It was therefore only a logical step in his development that in recent years he has also directed in addition to his work as a designer, for theater, musical and opera. Noteworthy were a number of large-scale location projects, including 'The Man in the Boat' in the former Cockerill-Yards shipyard in Hoboken near Antwerp or 'Ship of Troy' on the work island Neeltje Jans at the flood barrier of the Oosterschelde as part of the Zeeland Late Summer Festival.
He realized his first directorial work at the Noord Nederlands Toneel at the invitation of Pol de Hert, 'Explosion of a Memory', with text material by Heiner Müller, with composer Walter Hus and with actors such as Francois Beukelaers, Peter van Asbroeck Ellen ten Damme, Chiel van Berkel et al. Modified March 2012.
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Kortekaas Niek, Untitled.
4 Black and white photographs, Framed with 2 photographs, glass, 2x (51,5 x 116cm).
Conny kuilboer
Conny Kuilboer is a Dutch contemporary artist who studied at the HISK in Ghent, Belgium, in 2011 and 2012.
In 2007 she was an artist in residence at Schloss Ringenberg in Germany.
The main interest of Conny Kuilboer lies in the observation of different concepts concerning the perception of time. She translates these observations in objects, installations, drawings, poloroids and video.
Each observation can be seen as a little fragment in which a different concept is researched and elaborated. She says about her fascination: “Inch by inch I feel the surface of time slipping through my fingers capturing it in my works. Waiting and exploring. I want to intervene with the reality around me and make it mine by reconstructing it.”
The material she uses plays a significant role in these reconstructions. The material she uses most are blankets. For her it is an intriguing and polyvalent material with contradictionary qualities. Blankets protect and give warmth. They suggest comfort but can also be experienced as oppressive, irritating and often a fire hazard. The soft texture emphasizes with the elusiveness of her chosen subjects.
Besides from the objects she creates from blankets, She also works sitespecific. With installations she develops expansive stagings in which single artworks are used as a material for a bigger sort of gesamtkunstwerk. Following this approach, she started to collaborate with the artist Ben Kruisdijk in 2007. They developed a series of installations together where they researched some of the aspects of the artist existence.
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Kuilboer Conny, I've touched you a zillion times, 2011.
Fabric,15 x 9 x 2 cm.
Anniek mol
Running through the field, waving at the sun and portraying goddesses. These are some simple descriptions of my artworks. All my life nature has been very close to my heart, I always wonder about its beauty. I express this feeling, this admiration with photography. I do this not through words, but through images, because it is such a strong fascination that I can show and experience it better than trying to put it into words. Graduated in 2015 with autonomous visual arts at the Minerva Academy in Groningen.
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Mol Anniek, Light, 2012.
C-print on aluminium.
ERwin olaf
1959 - Hilversum
Erwin Olaf started his career as a photographer in the 1980s with photos in which extremes in appearance and identity predominate. They show an exuberant, stylized and provocative world. Shiny bodies, naked bodies in all their glory and tied hands and feet.
Power and sex are recurring themes. Olaf's series are sometimes over the top, other times less lavish and more simple. Paradise the Club (2001), for example, shows a psychedelic jumble of glitter, men and women in shiny golden panties, confetti, clowns, naked women with spread legs, Pinoccio, a man in bondage clothing and a princess with a beard. Fashion Victims (2000), on the other hand, is more subdued. Nevertheless, the nude still occupies a prominent place. The photos show undressed men and women with the genitals dominant and nothing but a bag from a well-known fashion brand over their heads.
Olaf takes staged photos. He directs his models as a director. In this way he can shape the image exactly to his will, which gives him the opportunity to compose life and make the world more beautiful. In his more recent work, Olaf examines the choreography of the body. How does a certain emotion affect a person's way of moving? Loneliness has other movements than joy. In the series Waiting (2014) Olaf zooms in on waiting. How about someone waiting? How does a hand lie on the table, how far is a glass of drink from someone, how obliquely someone keeps his head?
The nuance of the emotion lies in the details and nano-millimeters. The craft and mastery of the technique are very important to Olaf. In addition to photos, he also makes films and video work. In addition, Olaf works for Diesel, Heineken, BMW, The New York Times, Elle and Le Monde, among others. Olaf studied at the School of Journalism in Utrecht. In 2011 he wins the Johannes Vermeer Prize. Exhibitions of his work have taken place in the Hague Photo Museum, the Hermitage Amsterdam, Chelsea Art Museum (New York) and the Groninger Museum.
Olaf Erwin, Hope, The Kitchen, 2005.
Colour photograph, mounted on aluminium.
Aaron van erp
1978
“You can often laugh about gruesome things too.” With this remark, Aaron van Erp (1978-) characterizes his paintings that, with their often brutal subjects, still evoke a smile thanks to the bizarre titles. Aaron van Erp has had a flourishing career since graduating in 2001 from the Academy of Art and Design in 's-Hertogenbosch. Nationally and internationally, his paintings with their alienating representations have been included in various collections, including the leading Saatchi collection. Aaron van Erp opens his first museum solo exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag with an overview of paintings and drawings that he made from his Academy days until now, with the emphasis on his most recent work.
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Van Erp Aaron, Untitled, 2003.
Oil on canvas, 140 x 210 cm.
sanne van den elzen
1986 - Netherlands
Sanne van den Elzen is an artist who applies photography and video to question role patterns, behaviour and rules. She is interested in tradition versus ritual, in rules versus autonomy. Her work exists of restructuring and reconstructing (existing) images, by developing a work method that includes room for experimentation, and in which the method itself becomes part of the project.
van den Elzen Sanne, Hommage.
Henk visch
1950 - eindhoven
Henk Visch (Eindhoven, 1950) makes images. Sometimes these are thin lines of metal, like drawings in the air, at other times they are solid bronze volumes. As Visch himself says: "[...] my work has no direction, but all directions."
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Visch Henk, Unguided Tours, 2015.
Bronze, 210 cm.
Visch Henk, Place de la Paix, 2017.
Metal, epoxy, 163 cm.