calendario eventi  :: 

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16/1/2009

Two solo shows

Ellen de Bruijne, Amsterdam

Luuk Wilmering "the man who never experienced anything"
January 18th - February 21th

Luuk Wilmering (Haarlem, 1957) will be showing new work at Ellen de Bruijne Projects. He often appears in his own work; his earlier work shows his eminent presence and frequently only his presence. Wilmering comments: ‘There have been several considerations that lead me to use myself as a model. Firstly, I found it very useful to explicitly connect myself with the subject. In this way I could convey directly: This is how I feel about this, this is what concerns me. I felt that was important and I think this notion comes across. Another, very practical reason, was that I sometimes needed facial expressions or physical poses, which only I knew how to put it right.’

An example of this is the multiple The story of my life (2003). Wilmering is seen, gazing bored out of an open window, his heavy head supported by his hand. He is looking down to a roundabout, where cars are waiting in front of traffic lights. The next image shows Wilmering, suddenly jumped up from his seat, shouting out of the window with his hand to his mouth, as to force extra strength to his words.

It is like he suddenly feels the urge to interfere with that world below and comment on with spirited critique.

The new works in the expositions emerge from Wilmering’s technique, to create new coherent pictures. He creates them from endless separate details, partly deriving from the old collection of National Geographics, he’s got from his father when he was seven.

Jennie Regnerus writes about his work: ‘The characters in Wilmering’s collages have lost their way. Naturally, for Wilmering cut them loose from their own context and has put them into a new one, by his own means. This mingled versions of realities by Wilmering do more justice to the chaos in the world, than the average press photograph.’

Besides the new collages, there also will be a slideshow, The man who never experienced anything and a new painted photograpgh on show at Ellen de Bruijne.

Wilmerings collage series Heel Ander Blad (Whole Different Paper) and other painted photographs are on show at Museum De Pont in Tilburg. The opening for this exhibition will take place on Saturday 17th of January 3 pm – 5 pm. This exhibition will be on display until March 16th.

Opening Sunday January 18th 3 - 5 pm

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Michael Baers - Silence After Noise: Version Number 1
17 January - 21 February

What motivates the impetus to reform? What combination of historical forces crystallize for a brief period, effecting a change in the epistemic regime? In Michael Baers’ current work, history is a rebus, and the larger motives behind the urge to reform take the form of that exasperating piece that would complete the puzzle if only it could be located.

In “Silence After Noise”, which consists of two series of ink-wash drawings, linked by a photograph, Baers attempts to trace the myriad routes by which ideas were disseminated during two different epochs.

The first series depicts figures connected to the events that precipitated the Thirty Years War. This was a period in which hopes for emancipation from the political and philosophical chains of Catholic orthodoxy were instantiated by the spread throughout Europe of tracts and treatise advocating the universal reform of society—what the historian Frances Yates termed the “Rosicrucian Enlightenment”. These aspirations were ultimately undone by the movement’s own misplaced optimism, which persisted in the face of its failure to garner political support from Protestant rulers.

The second series depict figures from the history of the dissemination and subsequent suppression of LSD. Although LSD is now popularly perceived of as a recreational drug, its application both for therapeutic and military usage was the subject of intense research from the early 1950s to mid-1960s. The motivations of the scientists, therapists, and writers involved with this therapeutic research resemble in many ways those of the people at the heart of the Rosicrucian Enlightenment. The point of similarity between these two periods, is how the aspirations for general reform became opposed to and were subsequently engulfed by the larger ideological/geo-political conflicts, that they sought to ameliorate. So that in retrospect, the utopian hopes for reform and advancement appear to history as naive, misbegotten, and foolish.

The two series of drawings are linked by a large photograph in which Baers montaged the inkjet prints, that he uses to produce his drawings with source material. This was taken from two projects executed earlier in 2008—a “notebook” project for the Norwegian magazine Replikk, and a collaboration with the editors of Fucking Good Art, Robert Hamelijnk and Nienke Tepsma (who had invited him to Switzerland to produce a work on LSD). This source material, for reasons that are now obscure, he taped to a wall in his studio and then neglected to remove.

The narrative of the latter project, discernible amidst the sea of historical portraiture and photographs which now surround it, serves as a hinge linking the personal and political, situating the artist’s own personal and professional history, within these larger historical narratives with which he has been preoccupied. A key provides information on how the different individuals depicted are connected to the larger histories in which they appear—presenting the viewer with tools to fit the pieces together. Although, making “sense” of the different narratives, is a task that Baers leaves to the viewer.

*The Dolores exhibition is curated by Joris Lindhout

Image: Michael Baers

Opening Saturday 17 January 17 - 19 h.

Ellen de Bruijne
Rozengracht 207 A - Amsterdam
Gallery hours: Tu-Fri. 11 – 18 h. Sat. 13 – 18 h. 1st Sunday of the month 14 – 17 h.
Free admission

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