Marijke Van Warmerdam
dal 26/7/2006 al 16/9/2006
Segnalato da
26/7/2006
Marijke Van Warmerdam
The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh
First drop, what is and what will be. A first UK solo exhibition for this Dutch artist who uses film, photography, sculpture and installation to explore her abiding interest in circular movement, in the uniting of beginning and end in a non-linear understanding of time involving both anticipation and suspense.
Edinburgh Art Festival Exhibition
New and recent photographs, sculpture and film by
Dutch artist Marijke van Warmerdam, internationally
renowned for art which surprises the viewer with
unexpected poetry. Often depicting strange and
inexplicably wonderful moments - a pancake briefly
masquerading as the moon, a puddle stirred into
miraculous, shimmering life - it imposes itself on the
mind and memory with a potent exuberance.
Van Warmerdam is best known for her mesmerising short
films, which seem to suspend time, holding the viewer in a
continuous present. For this, her first major solo exhibition in
the UK, she has made two new films, and is exhibiting them
together with a specially selected sequence of other work.
Van Warmerdam is best known for her mesmerising short
films which seem to suspend the flow of time holding the
viewer in a continuous present. For this, her first solo exhibition
in Scotland, van Warmerdam has made two new films. In
Dream machine, a glass of water is diluted with milk, first
drop by drop, the white milk exploding vividly into the clear
water, then more quickly so that the water is clouded then
overwhelmed by the milk. As the two liquids merge and
dance together the camera zooms slowly inwards
suggesting a moment of increasingly intense absorption.
Before we know it the glass has vanished and we are
momentarily lost in the image, only for the camera to
withdraw, revealing a world irrevocably changed by the
experience. The second film, Wake up!, shows an Arcadian
landscape, seemingly untouched by human intervention.
The viewer is enticed, dreaming, into the perfection of the
landscape only to be rudely disturbed from reverie by a
huge splash of water which hits the landscape like a smack
in the face.
These works are joined by a sequence of films, photographs
and sculptures selected by the artist for The Fruitmarket
Gallery and previously unseen in Scotland. With a typically
light touch, the work combines a deceptively naive
approach to the act of seeing with straightforward
strategies such as dramatic shifts of scale, doubling,
reflection, rhythmic repetition or surprising juxtapositions to
urge us to look with our eyes wide open. Many of the salient
themes of the exhibition are made explicit in the sculpture
which lends it its title - a cotton wool cloud with a glass
raindrop quivering within it, permanently suspended on the
point of change. Van Warmerdam has used the work to
describe the entire exhibition: ‘the start of what is and what
will be; a sense of something about to happen, the raindrop
that is just about to fall’.
Notes to editors:
1. Van Warmerdam was born in Nieuwer Amstel, the
Netherlands, in 1959 and lives and works in Amsterdam.
She is an artist of established international reputation,
representing the Netherlands in the Dutch Pavilion at the
Venice Biennale in 1995, and featuring in Documenta X (1997)
and the 1998 Sydney Bienniale. Scottish audiences may have
seen her work in the group exhibition Moment, at Dundee
Contemporary Arts in 2000.
2. The exhibition will be accompanied by an 80pp full colour
catalogue with an essay by critic Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith
Marijke van Warmerdam’s exhibition will open to the public on
Thursday 27th July at 10am.
The Fruitmarket Gallery
45 Market Street - Edinburgh
Festival hours, 27 July—28 August 2006, 10am—7pm daily. Admission free.