August 5, 2012

Art by Simon Schrikker and Marie Civikov

Filed under: Art by Branko Collin @ 1:33 pm

Yesterday the old, today the new.

Last week art blog Trendbeheer showcased a couple of artists I had not seen before (here and here).

Simon Schrikker, 2010

Simon Schrikker was born in Utrecht but currently lives and works in Rotterdam. His work has a certain three-dimensional quality, not in the least because he sometimes puts the paint on thickly, and is not afraid to extend the canvas when the subject calls for it. Check his painting of a shark to see how the thick, sharp paint amplifies the danger emanating from the animal.

Schrikker’s work will be on display at the Drents Museum in Assen from September 15 to January 27.

I just realized, Marie Civikov, 2012

Marie Civikov studied at the Willem de Kooning Academie in Rotterdam. Bold colours and aggressive imagery make these paintings stand out. Civikov’s work is currently part of an exhibition at the Kunsthal in Rotterdam.

Lively art! Check out their websites.

(Photos by the artists.)

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August 4, 2012

Rijksmuseum Amsterdam buys rare drawing by teacher Rembrandt

Filed under: Art by Branko Collin @ 1:37 pm

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has bought this drawing of the Nerva Forum in Rome by Pieter Lastman for GBP 145,000 at an auction at Christie’s in London.

Historiek.net reports that Lastman made this drawing in 1602, Rembrandt’s birth year. It is one of his only two known Italian drawings in the world.

Lastman was a teacher of Rembrandt van Rijn and Jan Lievens. The former only studied for half a year with the master, but it is believed that Rembrandt’s use of light was influenced by what he knew about Caravaggio through Lastman.

Another important Rijksmuseum acquisition is a wooden sculpture by Hendrick de Keyser (1565-1621), the Screaming Child from 1615, which disappeared in 1897 and hasn’t been seen since. An anonymous donor gave it to the museum, which will display it in 2013 after the reopening of its main building.

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July 21, 2012

Real life tracking cookies

Filed under: Art,Food & Drink,Technology by Branko Collin @ 12:54 pm

Hacker collective Hack42 from Arnhem also experimented with laser Café Noirs.

With the new cookie law on everybody’s mind, it is not surprising that somebody decided to come up with real life tracking cookies.

That somebody was Utrecht-based events platform SETUP, who laser etched traditional Verkade Café Noir cookies with QR codes and handed them out during the Beschaving Festival at the end of June. SETUP doesn’t say how they kept tracking the cookies once eaten.

See also:

(Via Trendbeheer. Photo by Dennis van Zuijlekom, some rights reserved. Video: Youtube/SETUP.)

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July 14, 2012

Dré Wapenaar’s tree tent hotel

Filed under: Architecture,Art by Branko Collin @ 2:36 pm

Rotterdam-based artist Dré Wapenaar came up with these tear-shaped tents that can be hung from the stems of trees.

Four of these tents are currently forming a hotel in Borgloon, Belgium, where they are part of an open air art exhibit called PIT. A one-night stay will cost around 70 euro, according to The Pop-Up City. Trendbeheer adds that guests can have their breakfast seated on furniture by Ardie van Bommel, a recent Eindhoven Design Academy graduate.

The temporary hotel will be open for business until September 30.

Check out the Trendbeheer article for more photos of the exhibition.

(Photo by We Make Money Not Art / Régine Debatty, some rights reserved.)

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July 12, 2012

Dutch masters theft solved after 13 years

Filed under: Art,Sports by Orangemaster @ 5:20 am

Five of the seven paintings stolen from an elderly woman in Bilthoven, Utrecht back in 1999 turned up at a Christie’s auction last Wednesday. The police were called in and they’ve arrested three suspects, two in the Netherlands and one in Germany, involved in drugs and, well, theft from little old ladies. The most famous painting of the lot is probably ‘Antonius en Cleopatra’ (‘Anthony and Cleopatra’) from 1677 by Jan Steen. The other paintings are from the late 16th and 17th century.

The two paintings still missing from the now deceased elderly woman are more recent paintings, namely Isaac Israëls’ ‘Café-interieur-restaurant’ (‘Cafe interior restaurant’) from the 20th century and Wouterius Verschuur’s ‘Paarden in Schuur’ (‘Horses in a stable’) from the 19th century.

At the time of the theft, the paintings were valued at what is now 1,3 million euro (three million guilders).

Nice tangent: at age 63, Isaac Israëls actually won a Gold Medal at the 1928 Olympic Games, which were held in Amsterdam, for his painting Red Rider, an art competition that was part of the games.

(Links: www.dutchnews.nl, www.rtvutrecht.nl, Photo of Jan Steen by Stifts- och landsbiblioteket i Skara’s photostream, some rights reserved)

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July 9, 2012

Photo album exhibition at FOAM

Filed under: Art,Photography by Branko Collin @ 10:29 am

They used to exist, books in which people pasted prints of pictures they had taken.

Now that we’ve landed firmly in the digital age, in which prints appear to be the sole domain of ‘pixel peepers’ and newly-weds, Erik Kessels (him of In Almost Every Picture) has curated an exhibition at FOAM in Amsterdam that puts the photo album in the spotlight once again.

Writes FOAM:

Album Beauty is an ode to the vanishing era of the photo album as told through the collection of Erik Kessels (1966, The Netherlands). Once commonplace in every home, the photo album has been replaced by the digital age where images live online and on hard drives.

Photo albums were once a repository for family history, often representing a manufactured family as edited for display. They speak of birth, death, beauty, sexuality, pride, happiness, youth, competition, exploration, complicity and friendship. Album Beauty is an exhibition about the visual anthropology of the photo album.

Walking through the exhibition will be like leafing through a photo album. Erik Kessels is known for his unorthodox manner of installation and Album Beauty is no exception. On display will be hundreds of photo albums, all telling different but familiar stories. Some albums will be exaggerated in size and exhibited as wallpaper while others will be displayed in their original format. There will be interactive albums to flip through and life size cut outs for the viewer to walk around. Album Beauty features the endless formats of analogue photography many of which are no longer manufactured as well.

The exhibition will run from June 29 to October 14.

(Photo: FOAM)

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June 17, 2012

Canta, the little can-do car

Filed under: Art,Automobiles,Health by Branko Collin @ 2:35 pm

On June 28 Dutch National Ballet will perform a dance that includes a group of disabled people in their Canta cars.

The ballet is part of a larger project that includes a documentary series by Maartje Nevejan and a book by Karin Spaink about the Canta microcar, the only car that can legally drive on bike paths and pavements in the Netherlands, exclusively sold to the disabled.

Spaink herself has Multiple sclerosis. In the book, De Benenwagen, she writes about the moment when it was time to face the hard truth, the moment she had to get an invalid car:

Everything changed. Using my crutches, my speed was 3 km/h and my range 500 metres. With the wheelchair I reached speeds of 8 to 10 km/h for up to five minutes. […]

[When I took my first test drive], the speed scared me. “Oh no”, I panicked, “I cannot do this! I am so sorry… Please take it back to the factory! I made a terrible mistake.”

The mechanic made me stop to catch my breath. “Don’t worry, really, you’ll get used to it.” […] He was right. I got used to it in no time. […] The Arola [the Canta’s predecessor] gave me a large part of the freedom back that I had had to give up due to my disability.

The book talks about the history of the Canta, how it was designed by former Ferrari F40 racing driver Dick Waaijenberg, how it is the one car in the Netherlands that may drive on bike paths and pavements (other microcars are treated like mopeds before the law), and how Waaijenberg only sells them to the disabled. There are companies and organisations that own them, but they have to find theirs on the second hand market.

Karin Spaink does a good job of explaining the various aspects of the Canta and its predecessor Arola. The chapter where she joins the mechanic for his daily round is both insightful and moving. It provides a glimpse into the sort of people that need a Canta, and through Spaink we witness a man who gets sentenced to a life of decreased mobility, as his handicap has advanced too much for him to safely drive a microcar any more.

Benenwagen literally means ‘leg car’, and is used in an expression. If whiny kids ask their parents “but how will I get there?” when a distance is trivial, the answer will be “use the leg car”.

De benenwagen, Het succesverhaal van de Canta, Karin Spaink, ISBN 9789038894928.

Disclaimer: I have known Karin Spaink for almost two decades, and have supplied one of the photos for the book. The photo shown here though is by the prolific Facemepls, and is ‘some rights reserved‘.

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June 6, 2012

Helicopter cat Orville goes up in value

Filed under: Animals,Art by Orangemaster @ 2:29 pm

Artist Bart Jansen didn’t kill his cat Orville, a car hit him. Then he stuffed it in an unconventional way and turned him into a remote-controlled flying cat. Jansen had originally asked € 12,500 for his work of art, which was on display in Amsterdam at the KunstRai art fair until last Saturday. “The work has not yet been sold but we have an offer of € 100,000 on the table,” Jansen’s dealer Geoffrey van Vugt told Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant.

Cat brother Wilbur, both named after Orville and Wilbur Wright (aka the Wright brothers) is just a regular Dutch cat eating cat food made from other dead animals who obviously had a worse life, Jansen mentioned to the press.

It’s a tribute to the cat Orville, that was named after the famous aviator Orville Wright. After the cat was killed by a car, and followed by a period of mourning, visual artist Bart Jansen transformed him into the Orvillecopter: Now he is finally flying with the birds. The greatest goal a cat could ever reach!

You may choose to dislike Orville for all kinds of reasons — it’s pretty freaky! — but saying he killed his cat is utter nonsense. Last year Dutch conceptual artist Tinkebell was found not guilty of animal cruelty for an exhibition with 95 hamsters in exercise balls, while she had killed her ‘depressed’ cat and turned it into a handbag.

It will always be hypocritical to believe that some animals deserve to die for our use (pigs, cows, chickens) and get upset at cute pussy cats flying around because cats are cute and pigs are bacon. Hate Orville the Flying Cat, but Bart Jansen didn’t do anything wrong or even illegal. In fact, he’s honouring his cat in his own freaky way, whether we like it or not.

For anybody who needs an ethical reality check, the real dead people show Bodyworks (even more controversial) is still on in Amsterdam until 17 June and nobody is whinging about that anymore — and they used to. It was on at the very same time and not very far from the Art Fair where Orville was flying around until last Saturday.

(Link: www.dutchnews.nl, Photo of Dead cat by ndanger, some rights reserved)

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June 4, 2012

Colourful balloons ‘floating’ on and over water

Filed under: Art by Branko Collin @ 11:56 am

Artists Merijn Hos and René Reijnders from Utrecht worked together to create this Florentijn Hofman-like installation called Bubblegum for the Cultural Night in Almere (2010).

The balloons had LED lights inside, so that they could be lit up at night.

Link: The Pop-Up City. Photo: Merijn Hos.

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May 28, 2012

Suzanne Jongmans packing foam portraits

Filed under: Art,Photography by Branko Collin @ 11:21 am

BoingBoing writes:

Netherlands artist Suzanne Jongmans has created a series of portraits in the style of the Dutch Masters, creating the costumes out of soft packing foam sheets. She needs to team up with the artist who creates 15th century Flemish self-portraits using airplane toilet tissue and seat-covers. Together, they will rule the atemporal world.

A BoingBoing commenter points to the portrait work of Hendrik Kerstens, which in turn reminded me of the still lifes of Richard Kuiper.

(Photo: Suzanne Jongmans)

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