calendario eventi  :: 

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27/5/2005

Two exhibitions

GEM Museum of Contemporary Art, Den Haag

Daniel Pflumm

Daniel Pflumm (b. Geneva, 1968) is a Swiss artist who lives and works in Berlin. His work is replete with logos and samples from advertisements and TV programmes. He is active not only as a visual artist, but also as a graphic designer, techno musician and producer. At the GEM, in his first ever one-man show at any museum, Pflumm will exhibit a selection of his recent videos and light boxes reflecting on the visual culture of today.

Pflumm’s work explores our contemporary society and its heavy domination by the media, multinationals and an increasingly commercialised visual culture. Using his chosen means of visual expression, he criticises the influence of such factors on our everyday lives. An example of this kind of work is his video loop Paris (2003), which will occupy the GEM’s main exhibition space. Accompanied by insistent techno music, the loop is a high-speed collage of samples from TV adverts, logos (some manipulated by Pflumm), fragments of news footage and documentary material shot by the artist. The deluge of images is ordered by a process of free association based to some extent on internal visual correspondences and relationships. Pflumm piles up visual clichés to comic effect. There are ludicrous collages of TV adverts showing fruit plunging into dairy desserts, compilations of innumerable logos based on animal shapes, and sequences featuring opulent streams of toffee and toothpaste. Images like these are tellingly intercut with news footage of fleeing crowds, street disturbances and torched vehicles. All is not well in Pflumm’s crisis-ridden globalised universe. The images evoke unmistakeable associations with Naomi Klein’s bestseller No Logo, which reveals how big business is increasingly ruling our daily lives. In his light boxes, Pflumm exhibits abstract and deformed versions of logos. He himself says, ‘I have assessed so many logos, alienated and disfigured them, in a way that I would never previously have thought possible. From German industrial logos to my own I have robbed all logos of their meaning and liberated their form, on videos, on records and T-shirts and in light boxes’. Pflumm is equally at home in the art world as on the club circuit. He owns the Galerie Antik club in Berlin and used to own the Elektro and Panasonic discotheques. In 1995, together with musicians Klaus Kotai and Mo Leschelder, he set up the Elektro Music Department label, which has produced video clips, CDs and T-shirts printed with existing or invented corporate logos. In addition, he makes video works suitable for use in clubs and is active on the Internet: http://www.danielpflumm.com


28/05/2005 - 28/08/2005
Jeroen Allart

Clear, simple and colourful: three adjectives that sum up the paintings of Jeroen Allart (b. 1970). His exhibition at the GEM will fill six rooms with highly simplified paintings of landscapes. He has earlier produced humorous paintings not only of cats, rabbits and other animals, but also of cowboys, firemen, windmills and boats.
Jeroen Allart’s work has a refreshing lightness of touch. His amusingly simple paintings require no complex explanation. There is almost no other artist who shows us so directly what he wants us to see: a horse’s head, a burly fireman or, as now in the GEM, a landscape. Landscape painting tends to evoke associations with a past era but these are instantly banished by the first glimpse of Jeroen Allart’s work. His landscape paintings are invariably composed of a number of completely stylised elements – a field, the sky, a farm. Combined with the bright colours he uses, this simple visual idiom gives the landscapes a strong graphic quality. This is no accident: Allart completed a vocational design training for the graphics industry before attending the National Academy of Visual Arts (Rijksacademie) and the Willem de Kooning Academy. The choice of subject, unfussy shapes and bright colours of the series of landscape paintings to be shown at the GEM give the works a serenity that reflects that of the Groningen landscapes that inspired them.

GEM, Museum of Contemporary Art
Stadhouderslaan 43
2517 HV The Hague The Netherlands
Opening hours
Tuesday – Sunday 12 p.m. – 8 p.m.
Ticket office closes at 7.45 p.m.
Closed: 1 January and 25 December

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