19-08-14 9:47 pm – Source: Het Parool
September 2012 © Jan van Breda (www. janvanbreda.com)
Finally,
Actually, he had been a very long time to say goodbye. Forty years ago, Ger van Elk a series of photographic works titled “Adieu.” In a painting, the artist waving to the audience, where the painting is surrounded by a large, dark theater cloth.
Sunday passed the 73-year-old Van Elk in nursing Groenhof to Marnix. He was last summer suffered a brain hemorrhage and his condition worsened in recent months more and more.
In 2012 he caused a stir even with two gallery exhibitions in Amsterdam, Grimm and Borzo. Each of photographic works presented melancholy about a lost love, a woman who suddenly dumped him. Through his works, he tried to get her back, he said. “It’s a kind of farewell to the art. Every time I think now I quit. I want my whole life, “he told Het Parool. “What am I here? I wander around for years as a stranger in the arts. ”
This was largely against my better judgment, because Van Elk realized only too well that his work is anything but suffered from a lack of attention. At home and abroad, he was praised for his pioneering role in the development of conceptual art. With Jan Dibbets, Marinus Bosom and Stanley Brouwn belonged Van Elk in the sixties to a new generation of artists who radically knocked over the helm.
While the work of the previous generation was dominated by a personal signature or, in the case of pop-art, large canvases with a strong visual impact, was the work of conceptual artists consciously hypothermia. The idea behind the work of art was as important as the physical appearance of it, or even more important.
Van Elk participated influential exhibitions such as’ When Attitudes Become Form “(Kunsthalle Bern, 1969) and” On the loose screws “(Stedelijk Museum, 1969), in which the conceptual art for the first time to a large audience was shown.
Sign Industry
Ger van Elk lived almost his entire life in his native city of Amsterdam, but he often stayed in America. At age eighteen he traveled to Los Angeles, where his father worked in the animation industry, Hanna & amp; Barbera, known from The Flintstones. “I thought it was fantastic. Especially at the Immaculate Heart College, an art school run by nuns in open Cadillacs reason – that was something else than that dopey Institute of Applied Art where I had hung in Amsterdam a few years.
have undoubtedly contributed to Van Elk in his work masterfully could combine. The sublime with the banal Such experiences He worked with all kinds of materials, but his work often consisted of a combination of photography and painting. He also experimented with short, often witty films. In ‘The Well-Shaven Cactus’ (1969-1971) is a cactus with a clipper stripped of its spines. In ‘The Flattening of Brooke’s Surface “(1972) the artist in a rubber boat futile attempts to smooth the surface. Ditch a smooth
Trouwfoto fatherless
If Van Every child learned all the pictures in the least reliable to capture reality. Then he sniffed the secretary of his mother at the age of twelve, he came across photos that were not meant for his eyes. ‘Wedding Photos of marriage with my father alone: my father was cut off. But you saw somewhere in the picture his hand. A little later I found out that the communists in the Soviet Union did something similar with Trotsky. There are those speeches have been on the Red Square, where some men were simply cut out and then left alone Lenin. ”
Of Elks famous work from this time remained unsold years: a little white cube that as a crown jewel rests on a red velvet pillow. The whole is covered by a bell jar of plexiglass. The wooden block was painted white in 1971 by Van Elk middle of the Atlantic Ocean, in a place where the air is so pure that dust got no chance to settle. On the wet surface The perfectly painted block was baptized by the artist La Pièce. A few years ago it was bought by the Kröller-Müller Museum.
Of Elks role in the new art form is undisputed, but he himself could not do much with the label ‘conceptual art’. Craftsmanship, the handwriting of the artist and the beauty of the work were in the conceptual art are all subordinate to a good idea. Then came Van Elk later. He felt himself primarily a poet, who was looking for poetic beauty.
No rigorous conceptual purist
From Over the years, each also received increasing interest in classic pictorial image resources. Example, he made a series of works about Kinselmeer reminiscent of seventeenth-century seascapes. Each of the end proved to be no strict conceptual purist to be, but a curious artist the pictorial traditions of European art studied. “When you’re young, you want to explore what your field is. Later you realize that history repeats itself. If you look at the Flemish Primitives in Bruges, Hans Memling, Rogier van der Weyden: the concentration that emanates from that work ‘!
In Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, he made an installation with a series of seventeenth-century landscapes and seascapes from the collection of the museum. He showed them to hang together so that formed the horizon in the paintings one long straight line of more than twelve meters. In a second group of paintings, this time from the nineteenth century, he did something similar, but here the canvases hung upside down.
In recent years, Van Elk stopped a lot of energy in ‘Flat’ project. He used LCDs and hid it behind a mat and oak frame. The result looks like a moving watercolor. In this way he was able to present old movies of himself again, but he also made new videos for this flat screens.
Work Ger van Elk is found in numerous museums at home and abroad. At present the exhibition ‘Bad Thoughts’ in the Stedelijk Museum a room dedicated to Van Elk. The Kröller-Müller are flat screens are part of the exhibition about Georges Seurat. And Kunstverein München is a solo exhibition of his work
(By: Kees Keijer).
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