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24/1/2014

Stief Desmet

C&H art space, Amsterdam

The Belgian artist Stief Desmet presents his new series of paintings and sculptures. Stief Desmet’s work is characterized by the use of recognizable symbols, powerful, familiar images, nestled in our collective minds, our memory. These are sometimes deliberately, sometimes intuitively, chosen and then put down in an accurate way or in confrontation with the environment. His paintings and sculptures explicitly reference images and symbols from daily life, art history and fairy tales, but his work always gives the viewer the freedom of movement. They do not command or declare anything but simply testify to the freedom of movement itself. They are always open to interpretation.

His art is ironic, iconoclastic, associative and a complex combination of multiple impulses: building, searching and destroying. The impulsivity and the struggle of his work is reflected in the media used: painting, sculpture, installation and performance. In his work we can see a deer, a fox, a house in a forest, fairy tale characters: he depicts the city life, familiar and inspiring, and the natural world, with animals and landscapes. It is like Stief Desmet is hovering between two worlds in order to escape from reality.

Stief Desmet shows great love for painting: the surface of his paintings is the result of layers and layers of images that overlap, intersect, cover or penetrate one another. The result is a surface that has vibrating layers of images. A pleasant art, often evoking a smile, half nervous, half liberating: it is almost as if the artist is in a constant playful but fierce and determined struggle with the visual wall. But Desmet escapes also to other media, like sculpture. He likes exploring the new media in a playful but thorough manner. The three-dimensional aspect of sculpting and installation gives a huge vitality to his work as well as spaciousness and monumental beauty.

Stief Desmet lives and works in Belgium. He studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent. He is well known for his outdoor sculptures in several public and private venues in Ghent, Brussels, Berlin, Rotterdam and Paris. Since 2002 he has taken part in several solo and group exhibitions in The Netherlands and Belgium.

Opening: January 25, 17:00 -19:00

C&H art space
2de Kostverlorenkade 50 Amsterdam Olanda
Gallery hours: Thursday to Saturday, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m or by appointment

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