Iris van Dongen stedelijk museum schiedam NL

Iris van Dongen (Tilburg, 1975, lives and works in Berlin) is a snake-charmer in art. Her work evokes soft sounds, but also a suspicion of furtive danger. She creates painterly drawings that are dominated by women: monumental, multicoloured and mysterious.
With dual layers of pastels and charcoal over one another, Van Dongen evokes gorgeous heroines in a shadowy environment. They could be sisters or, to put it more imaginatively, modern descendants of the goddesses from classical mythology: eternally young, beautiful and strong, and adorned with the allure of a (tragic) princess, even in their sorrow.
Moreover, reflections of the present day and current surroundings converge with memories of romantic or symbolic painting from the nineteenth century, by English Pre-Raphaelites such as John Everett Millais and Viennese Jugendstil artists such as Gustave Klimt. But even with their entire wealth of history, her women are clearly ambassadors of the twenty-first century.
In a period of five years, between 2003 and 2009, they have developed from melancholy girls to emancipated celebrities, who seem to have stepped directly out of a film noir and subsequently perform as pin-ups. Whereas they once let their minds drift away, as endearing figureheads of gothic subculture, clad in black-and-white sweatbands and scarves covered in skulls, they now stand tall and unflinching before the public: as magical creatures with red flash-light eyes, who can indulge in living dragons as amulets and allow a tangle of snakes to twine around their legs.
These femmes fatales are mistress of themselves, nature and the beast in mankind. At the same time, the snake is their weapon, their jewel and their alter ego. The title given by Van Dongen in 2008 to the series of drawings is Suspicious, and it immediately sounds as if the snake himself is speaking. His hissing ensures us that one cannot mock these heroines, alert and self-conscious as they are. They are the high-priestesses of women-power.
Although Van Dongen's work is appealingly well drawn, delicately coloured and richly decorated almost to the point of decadence, that duality of worlds consistently recurs. The seductive and the treacherous are willing bedfellows. Just as the king, queen and jack are duplicated as inverted busts on playing cards, and on tarot cards the fabulous figures lend themselves for an abundance of interpretations, Van Dongen's drawings are replete with contrast: inner and outer, light and dark, life and death, all revelling in a continuous role-play.
Night has Fallen (2005) displays a young girl cloaked by shadow, carrying her heart in her hands, as if she is offering it – perhaps to us, her public, perhaps to a lover who is out of the picture. Elsewhere she advances side by side with death, in works with significant titles such as She is the Night (2004). Here, she emerges from a garden in which a skull can be seen in the leaves of the trees, as in a vision. Her hypnotizing gaze reinforces the feeling that she is situated in a twilight zone, halfway between the present-day and the hereafter, where a skull is more of an object than a symbol; it is more of a creature, like a snake.
The skull, the snake and the devil. In the latest work, Mephisto appears on the scene, sometimes in the background as a sculptural decoration near to a seated woman, but also in person. We see him half dancing with a woman who is hanging in his arms, drowsy with sleep. Their loose embrace is tender, with elegant gestures, and the threat of a cruel twist of fate hangs eternally above them. The drawing entitled Echo (2008) sublimates a moment in time: the indivisible oneness of light and dark. Or, in the words of Van Dongen: ‘It is as if the woman's spirit has become visible next to her body.' With the skull, the snake and the devil, she has life and death walk side by side in all her drawings, as do good and evil. ‘Because that is simply the way we live: with our demons in and around us.'

To accompany the exhibition Iris van Dongen. Suspicious. Drawings 2003 – 2009 a catalogue with a wide selection of the drawings will be published in conjunction with BnM Uitgevers. This book, with an essay by Sacha Bronwasser, will be available in the Museum Shop for € 25.

Quote taken from a conversation between the author and the artist in her studio in Berlin, 13 November 2008



Iris van Dongen. Suspicious
Tekeningen 2003 – 2009
25 januari – 10 mei 2009

Peter Doig at Michael Werner and Gavin Brown

Peter Schjeldahl February 9, 2009

Frank O’Hara pegged the going look of urbane sex appeal, in 1962, as “a little ‘down,’ a little effortless and helpless.” He could have been forecasting the dominant fashion in painting almost fifty years later, exemplified in the resonant languors of Luc Tuymans and Elizabeth Peyton and positively exalted, to peaks of forthright ambivalence, by Peter Doig. Concurrent shows, at Michael Werner and Gavin Brown, of the Scots-born, Canadian-raised, English-educated Doig, who lives in Trinidad, answer the question “Why paint now?” with eloquent shrugs. His brushy landscapes and dreamlike or, better, half-awake visions of odd personages (notably “Man Dressed as Bat,” in two versions, at Werner) variously recollect Munch, Klimt, Nolde, Matisse, Rothko, and other past masters, in a spirit less of homage than of smart despair. Doig’s is an art up to its nostrils in historical quicksand. His raffish drawing and quite wonderfully seductive color promote this fix as our best available fun: post-everythingness, for the hip heck of it. ♦

Peter Doig at CFA Berlin

Peter Doig at CFA Berlin with a choice of works that are already sold...
Plus tons of drawings for his movie screening evenings!
A wunderfull show!
Go see....

Tjebbe Beekman-The Capsular Civilization

THE HAGUE.- The Gemeentemuseum presents the first ever major museum retrospective of work by Berlin-based artist Tjebbe Beekman (b. Leiden, 1972), who is well-known for his supercharged paintings of inner-city architecture. The exhibition covers the period between 2003 and the present, focusing principally on Beekman’s latest cycle of paintings and drawings, entitled The Capsular Civilization

The exhibition shows how earlier work by Tjebbe Beekman – who trained at the KABK in The Hague from 1993 to 1997 – led the way to his latest cycle. A typical example of this earlier work is Palast (2005), a painting based on the well-known Sozialpalast building in Berlin’s western district of Schöneberg. Beekman shows a number of floors of the dilapidated building, its rows of windows only occasionally interrupted by the circular shapes of satellite dishes. The handling of the paint gives the painting a lively, animated look, like big-city life itself.

Tjebbe Beekman employs a highly systematised creative process. First of all he uses photographs to make a collage, which he then uses as the basis on which to sketch out his composition. Next he lays the canvas on the floor and proceeds to apply a variety of gloss paints, gobs of oil paint, sand, string, and other waste materials. Lastly, he reconsiders the painting and paints over sections of it to give them greater emphasis and bring the final composition to life.

Although social criticism is present in his earlier work, it is far more prominent in the cycle of seventy sketches and five paintings entitled The Capsular Civilization. The title refers to that of a book by Lieven DeCauter, subtitled On the City in the Age of Fear. DeCauter’s main thesis is that the speed of contemporary technology and the ever more extreme polarisation of our society are forcing us to withdraw into the safe ‘capsules’ of our vehicles and architectural cocoons like shopping malls, gated communities and amusement parks. The seventy sketches, which can be regarded as illustrations accompanying the five paintings, constitute a picture atlas depicting ‘capsular phenomena’ of this kind and relating them to each other.

One of the most striking paintings in the cycle is Control Room, which shows innumerable blue screens casting their pale light into an otherwise almost entirely darkened room. You have to look carefully to see that there are human figures lurking behind the screens. This control room is keeping the whole outside world under surveillance but is itself entirely divorced from reality. In Beekman’s work, capsularization and control seem to breed a sense of isolation and lack of purpose, rather than the intended feeling of security. In pictures like this, Beekman conveys a not particularly rose-tinted view of the society in which we live.

order the catalogue here
Gemeente museum Gem Website

Gagosian Gallery Cecily Brown

"I'm more interested in sublimation. I love the way Francis Bacon talked about the grin without the cat, the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance…I've always wanted to be able to convey figurative imagery in a kind of shorthand, to get it across in as direct a way as possible. I want there to be a human presence without having to depict it in full."

Cecily Brown

coming up!!!

at the 14th of december my solo show at the GEM museum The Hague.
Also presented then and for sale the new catalogue: Tjebbe Beekman-the image of the capsulated society.

GEM Museum modern art The Hague Holland

tip: print this jpeg and it´s a doorpass to join us at the opening party the 20th.

berlin gallery round

So finally i´m not so busy anymore and had some time to do a walk around and visit some of the way to many gallery´s here in Berlin.
I haven´t seen much but what i saw was damn good!
For starters go see the new works by David Schnell at Eigen+Art, his work has developed in an amazing way!
With very loose strikes and a very concentrated way of painting his new images are so terrifying good that I was jealous at the spot!

Go see!!!

Further on at the Max Hetzler gallery mister Jeff Koons, although i thought i wasn´t in for a round of kitsch, i must admit these works are great!
And as a surprise we saw a lot of new works by Sigmar Polke at Julius Werner.
Beautifull paintings with a very luxurious trick wich i wont tell you about, just take a look and see how clever made these works are.
At the Carlier/Gebauer there´s a movie by Rosa Barba also go see.

Tip in the middle of this walkabout stop at Sale et Tabaki for some authentic Italian espresso or a good lunch!
ciao

Peter Doig - Frankfurt am Main

quick round berlin

i´m very sorry but do not have the time at the moment to publish much on this blog lateley.
I´m prepairing for a show and it just takes up all my time so here a very quick incomplete updat of shows i´ve seen in berlin...