calendario eventi  :: 

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6/3/2015

Two Exhibitions

C&H art space, Amsterdam

ANTIEN JONGSMA
De Nederlandse natuur

Opening: 7 March, 17:00 – 19:00 hours
7 March 2015 – 11 April 2015
Gallery hours: Thursday to Saturday, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m or by appointment

C&H art space proudly presents the solo exhibition of Jantien Jongsma, De Nederlandse natuur.

In this exhibition, Jantien Jongsma displays a new series with her personal vision on reeds, flowers, birds, and forests, drawing inspiration from her encounter with nature while a youth. Her mother was a collector of nature photography and illustrated plant guides and knew a lot about birds and flora. Her family owned a summerhouse in Drenthe, where they strolled around the paths of the forest or went on daytrips to, for instance, De Hoge Veluwe, where her mother pointed out plants, trees, and birds. During a recent reencounter with her mother’s books, she immediately recognized the landscapes, heathlands, and forest fens from her memories. In the cut-outs, Dutch nature reveals itself more in a figurative way, and represents Dutch culture: our way of forming works, towns, villages, or families, the manner in which Dutch society is structured, and even how our landscape is an expression of Dutch culture.

Encounters, societies, history, life, and memories are central themes to the work of Jantien Jongsma. Plattegrond voor middelbare leeftijd (2010), a map of past events from the life of the artist, is her best known work. She also made a series of drawings of Frisian towns like Harlingen, Franeker, Sexbierum, St. Jacobiparochie, and Dokkum, in which personal memories and fiction are intertwined. The series provisionally ends with a drawing of her current hometown, Amsterdam, and can expand in the future. A trip to Brazil inspired her to make works about the Dutch colonial past, often called Paradijs. For her solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Kampen she made the paper cut-outs based on her drawings, a technique that came from China and became popular in The Netherlands during the seventeenth century.

Jantien Jongsma’s work is very labor intensive. Every artwork begins with a colored ink surface that connects a multitude of depicted elements. She starts with drawing a basic element and works out the composition from there. Every element has the same importance; size is relative and the perspective changes. This is inspired by medieval Mappa Mundi, in which the amount of space a place occupies is determined by the importance of that place. She works associatively and depicts both figurative things as abstract fields with lines and patterns, often derived from folkloristic art and samplers. She uses several techniques: painting, drawing, and collage with left-over pieces of cut-outs.

Jantien Jongsma (1965) lives and works in Amsterdam. She studied drawing at the Amsterdam Academy for Visual Arts and Painting, and graphics at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. She participated in several solo and group exhibitions and had a solo presentation at the Stedelijk Museum Kampen in 2014. Her work is in the collection of the Fries Museum, the Karmel Monastery in Drachten, and CBK Rotterdam.

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Project Room:
Johan Nieuwenhuize

The subjective gaze with which everybody faces images is the starting point for the work of Johan Nieuwenhuize. He draws patterns from the city structure and guides us into a deeper understanding of the environment we live in, but at the same time he offers a different perspective on the already too recognizable context that surrounds us. The spectator is immersed in a hypnotic view of abstract or semi-abstract compositions that provides a new perspective or even an unknown visual experience.

Nieuwenhuize’s role in the project IMG_ is collecting the essence of the city with the aim of creating a dialogue with the subconscious of the spectator. He used his trips around Europe and the US to gather this series of photographs, which aren’t just documentation, but bearers of the artist’s memories. As a result of this research he created an archive of images in which the memories of his trips became unrecognizable to the spectator. It is fair to say that the value of IMG_ lies in the precision of the creation and the invitation to reflect on the stories that are told.

Johan Nieuwenhuize (1980) graduated in photography from the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague. He was artist-in-residence at the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing and was the curator and director of Platform57. His work has been shown internationally at various events in cities like New York, Glasgow, and Beijing. His work is in the permanent collections of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, VU University, de Koninklijke Schouwburg Den Haag, Fotografisk Center in Copenhagen, and the Collectie Pieter en Marieke Sanders, Haarlem. The international publishing house Kehrer Verlag published IMG_ (118 pages, hardcover with four altar folds, design by -SYB-, text by Robin van Emden and Malcolm Dickson). The book will be available during the exhibition.

Image: ‘Op verkenning bij de dieren’ 2014, mixed media on paper, 63 x 84cm

Opening: 7 March, 17:00 – 19:00 hours

C&H art space
Tweede Kostverlorenkade 50
Amsterdam

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