La giovane scultura Olandese-La XLIII Biennale di Venezia

La giovane scultura Olandese-La XLIII Biennale di Venezia
De jonge Hollandse beeldhouwkunst – De XLIII (43e) Biënnale van Venetië
La giovane scultura Olandese is een tentoonstellingscatalogus, Palazzo Sagredo 26 giugnio-25 settembre 1988
Jaar: 1988
Taal: Engels en Italiaans
Afmeting 22 x 27,50 cm
ISBN: 90-71465-17-9 / 9071465179

Conditie: deze versie van ‘La giovane scultura Olandese’ is in nette conditie

La giovana scultura Olandese – Sculpture as mirage

Holland is a flat country of low horizons and high skies.
It is sometimes referred to as the Low Countries, a land of extended polders lined by straight canals, roads and ditches, of broad, winding rivers, of wide lakeland vistas like blue-
grey mirrors.
Water, sky and light are in constant motion, as is the wind.
La giovane scultura Olandese
In this country the art of painting, the reflection of light, has always flourished.
The only distinguishing features of the atmospheric landscape are dikes and bridges,
churches and houses, factory chimneys and trees.
Hollandhas no mountains or ravines, no crags or caves, no rocks or
holes to stimulate sculptural imagination.
A Dutch mountain is a painterly illusion on the wall, as Jan Dibbets demonstrated at the 1 972 Venice Biennale with his Dutch Mountains, purely visual constructions built up of systematically arranged impressions of land and sea.
In Holland sculpture has a less rich tradition than painting, not only because of the iconoclasm which was at its direst in 1566.
The landscape’s constantly changing light has evidently been more of an inspiration to painters than to sculptors.
Making a sculpture in Holland is like creating a plastic form from a flat plane, three di-
mensions from two, a statuefrom a painting, reality from illusion, something from virtually nothing.
It is tantamount to the struggle to make land from sea.
In such an atmosphere, sculpture becomes a kind of mirage, like Ger van
Elk’s Mont Blanc Mountain Sculpture.
Unlike Dibbets, he did not wrest a mountain from the flat landscape
but made Europe’s highest peak as flat as a rug.
His mountain consists of five triangles bearing painted-over photographs of the summit and tapering towards the top.
This lying relief, only a few centimetres high, is indeed an extremely flat resolution of a highly plastic item.
It takes a lot of irony to depict the relationship between painting and sculpture in Holland in this way, by means of a Swiss mountain and a cliché image to boot.
An ill-starred work, though, for while it was on show in the Dutch pavilion at Venice, it was
attacked by mould caused by rising damp. Life is not all a bed of roses for Dutch sculpture.
It may be termed a minor miracle that the spirit of a new
kind of sculpture started to hover over the Dutch waters in the eighties.
The resulting movement was not confined to the country’s boundaries but formed a continuum with
kindred international trends.
A few young sculptors refrained from directly pursuing the beaten track of the sculpture of the sixties and seventies – minimal art, arte povera and conceptual art.
Nor did they adopt the semi-abstract idiom strongly allied with crafismanship that is frequently
employed in the Netherlands.
Instead, they sought their images in the present, i.e. a form of sculpture which would react significantly to their own age – the eighties, a time of expansion for computers and computer languages, and ofvisual profusion in the media.
The gathering momentum of electronic and social development caused faith in a rectiliniair avant garde to waver, giving way to a post-modern view of art and history.
The sculptors of the eighties who were seeking contact with their own age, radically reoriented their lives and sculpture, pondering on what sculpture was and had been and ought to be.
A sculptor who relatively early produced original images which did not come forth from accepted sculptural idioms is Henk Visch.
His highly personal sculptural vision emerged clearly for the first time at Young Art from the Netherlands, an exhibition held at the Basle Kunstmesse in 1982.
Robert O’Brien, who died on April 16, 1988 started working with Irene Fortuyn in 1983 under the joint logo Fortuyn/0’Brien.
He and Niek Kemps featured prominently in Groene Wouden (Green Woods, 1983), an exhibition which
broached the issue of sculpture’s place and function organized by Marianne Brouwer at the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, the show may still be regarded as a forceful state- ment on the presentation of sculpture in the eighties.
Peer Veneman and Harald Vlugt, who came from the Amsterdam punk climate and the alternative exhibition circuit, were launched internationally, as were Visch, O’Brien and Kemps, in Beelden/Sculpture 1983, a show which was organized by the Rotterdam Arts Council and which charted new European and American sculpture on a large scale.
A special case is Pieter Laurens Mol, an artist who in the seventies used photography or text to realize sculptural concepts; over the past few years these have asumed increasingly concrete form in a synthesis of idea and material.
The work of these six artists raises questions as to the sense and meaning of sculpture by integrating them into a sculpture, or by providing such unusual, at times illogically formulated answers as to prompt more questions.
Sculptural thinking is stimulated by confrontations of immaterial and material, of transparant and opaque, of abstract and concrete.
Ideas about sculpture form the actual space in which these works stand; conversely, they create space for the beholder’s ideas.
Generally speaking the sculptures are not heavy or massive, but contructions and models which
are vehicles for ideas.
Sculptures as conceptual models or constructed concepts.
Painting hovers in the background, not only because of the incorporated painterly elements but
also because many of these works are wall-sculptures.
Henk Visch is the only one whose works are almost all conceived for the floor.
The works of Mol, Kemps, Fortuyn/O’Brien, Veneman and Mugt often hang at varying heights on the
wall.
Not only painterly, but also graphic, architectural and even theatrical concerns play a part in the sculptural idiom ofall fall these artists.
Their synthetic, artificial products consist partly of natural materials and partly of plastics.
The human figure and proportions have not vanished entirely, although this sometimes appears to be the case when constructions and scenes distance themselves from humans, in a cosmic perspective or a superhuman monumentality.
The spatial aspect treated so emphatically by Fortuyn/0’Brien, Kemps and Mol is balanced by the plastic forms of Visch, Veneman and Vugt, an indication of the field of tension between concept and form in La Giovane Scultura Olandese.

@ La Giovane Scultura Olandese