My last post in 2016: a still from video art work of Liu Chengrui. When I saw it I thought about moments I choose in the passing year to close my eyes. 
Sometime it was too much and it feels like the only way to survive. Sometime I did it as an insider and sometime as an outsider. With this perfectly design aesthetic image I wish for a better year.

More than the masks hanging on the walls, these piles of masks made a bigger impression on me. Therry Oussou uses basic and simple materials like paper to create a strong impact. Perhaps he had death masks in his mind, but when I saw these piles, I thought of the dead we see every day.

Even closely looking does't unveil the material this work is made of. Lindsay Carone uses plastic bags which she cuts into pieces to weave this beauty. What was left over by consumers, from useful yet polluting things, became an unuseful object, which is friendly to the eye and to environment.

A woman dressed with official clothes, compressed between the floor and the roof. Seems that she is in a hurry to get somewhere. A child is hung on her back. It is not clear if he, the child, is the one who pushes or the one who is pulled. Maybe both. Marijn Akkermans succeeds to describe complicated moments in women’s life. Anyhow, in mine.

Usually tanks and tractors leave deep tracks wherever they pass, flattening anything on their way. The chain, which is usually that which leaves the scars, in this case, contains the cure to them. Majid Biglari combined the handmade chain with old maps, and by that creates a hope for better days.

Katrien de Blauwer was not the only artist who used old photos as a part of collages. But in her case, it doesn't look like a decoration or as a trendy act. Here, in one hand, the materials and the color create a perfect composition, and at same time a mystery is created: who is the woman in the photo.

The small space is burdened with details. The pattern of the tablecloth, the printed flowers on canvas in the background; even the potted plants that surround the figure. Even the clothes she wears are in colorful and different patterns. But it seems that all this does not touches her . Atong Atem photographed this lady, sitting as if nothing can break into her private inner world.

I was walking with my daughter in Kensington gardens in 26˚C! It was hot, and humid. Entering inside this beautiful pavilion made a big difference. Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) created a cool, and shady space, shaped in an organic form. We felt comfortable immediately. Apparently BIG managed fo find a formula for buildings in a hot and humid environment. For places in which the buildings can be fitted to the difficult, physical conditions.

The way Masha Trebukovain drew this angel made me feel like I could trust her, the angel. She, the angel, protects the man and warns him at the same time. Not like the one of Paul Klee (Angelus Novus), who looks at the history of human beings in its entirety, this Trebukovain angel choose the difficult path:  to confront an individual.

BEST OF GRADUATES 2016.  When you visit an academy’s graduation exhibition, your mind set has to be adjusted tto a different mode; different than visiting any other exhibition. In these exhibitions, students can show immature works or a beginning of a search, it is even recommended. But many times they are trying to show final products in these graduation exhibitions, which are many times with a weak artistic statement. The work of Anatole de Benedictis surprised me! Humble, precise works on A4 papers which look like an urban plan and a typography at the same time, sliding between the scale of the city and the scale of letters. Touching De Stijl, Mondrian and others but whilst maintaining a unique voice. 

I entered curious to the exhibition of known Yayoi Kusama. It took me only few minutes to feel that even my soul is covered with her famous polka dots. I found that her drawings have much more depth than just those dots, and her installations have much more meaning; like this one. In a field of uncooked pasta, penises in different sizes, some erected and some after, scattered in female shoes. Somehow it looks as if the penises are a bit lost, and dependent on these shoes to find their way.

It was a special experience to be part of the magic of Goof Kloosterman. First, you have to look and find where the magic is hidden.  When you discover it, be patient and slowly through the installation the magic will come up. Blurred shapes become clear and like a ghost forms are shaped to a clear picture. After a second, it all disappears and it looks like nothing had happened a minute ago!  

It is possible that Johanna Ehde is not the first one who came with the idea of DAMTEXI (women’s taxi service). In any case, she did it very well. To raise such loaded topics as underpaid women’s labour, you need to create the right conditions to make your point. Ehde does it in a direct and precise way.
P.S. She is one of very few students in this Graduation Show which dares to confront social issues. 

3rd july, 2016. Galerie 23, Amsterdam. In his broad series, Paul Cézanne painted again and again the Montagne Sainte-Victoire. The essence of his series was to understaned the meaning of nature. The combination of the colors he used, shows the contrast between the light and the shadows, and at the same time shapes the existing forms of the mountain. In Doorson’s drawing, the essence is the upward-looking head with its tightly closed lips. Although, like Cézanne, he uses the color to create contrast between the light and the shadows, in Doorsen’s case, the drama is in the gesture itself.

Almost every frame in this video artwork was in a perfect composition; a big challenge for every video maker. Iris Box succeeded to combine sophisticated humor by using “known” tools in new ways. You could feel how she takes it all as an experiment, as she named the work itself. Her other works in this exhibition had the same intelligent spirit as well as serious and professional performance.

When Constant Nieuwenhuys was born, Vladimir Tatlin showed the wooden model of The Monument to the Third International (1920) for first time. It is not clear if Nieuwenhuys was inspired by this ideological monument, but you can see that the main element symbolized the endless time in both of their works. In Tatlin’s, the endless time is in endless spiral; in Nieuwenhuys’s it is the red petal in this Mechanical Flower.

​3 years ago I wrote here about the work of Jan Hoek in Ron Mandos gallery​​
​(​http://www.roniteden.com/posts/28th-jan-2013-gallery-ron-mandos​)​ It was great to see how ​​Hoek​ developed his artistic language.
But what was even better, he succeeded to keep his​honest contact and respect to​ his models​, as​ you can see ​here.​

Although this work’s title is Untitled, I’m almost sure that artist Avery Singer drew New York, his city of birth. If you imagine yourself flying from the ground to the sky like Superman did, this might be what you would see. Black and white lines crossing and meeting each other while light and shadows are looking for a way to reflect the many layers of the city.

In this video art work, artist Adelita Husni-Bey follows a group of children with her camera in an alternative school in Paris. It is a group of 10 kids trying to define and shape the society they want to be part of. They found a few great solutions: to avoid chaos, it is better to sit together and to listen to each other (!!) To put people in jail, doesn’t always teach them how to behave. The best moment was when one of them almost became the king, the rest of the group understood that this will bring them disaster (!!)

This year more than any year, I had the feeling that the artists did what I would expect from art students: to research and to experience. This year in many works, like this one of Brendan Anton Jaks, the artist explored and tried out how martials works, inventing new forms, experienced space, mixing together different media and looking for balance. There were some students that still wanted to be nice by producing a nice product but overall there was finally an atmosphere of breaking the rules and looking for new land.

I was excited to find a group of contemporary portraits there. They were located in a tiny place, but still, they were there! First I walked through the impressive classical portraits from the last centuries. But only here, in this section, I felt that the art work is challenging me and not only to the artist him or herself. This portrait of Shami Chakrabarti, director of the human rights pressure group Liberty, made by Gillian Wearing, who placed this important activist/leader in one of the most established, cultural institutes of London. Maybe it is about time to give the floor to the more current, uprising leaders from the last century.

Can any stone which is spread on the floor be called “a gesture to Zen Garden”? I was asking myself this question while I saw this installation of Bosco Sodi. I didn’t get any Zen spirit when I walked beside the golden colored, shining stones spread on the floor of a prestigious gallery in the center of the shopping area of London. I think this is the opposite of a Zen garden.

All you need is some colorful paper, scotch tape and internal monsters that control your mind to be able to create this work. Like a troop of personal soldiers, the series of paper figures, in the size of an average doll, standing next to each other on a shelve in the exhibition. They might be the personal soldiers of Kpgo Shoichi which help him to fight his/her personal monsters.

Here is the one, Isa Genzken (a woman!), who dares to say out loud "Fuck the Bauhaus" to fanatical idealists (most of them men!). She creates different house models which are totally the opposite of the Bauhaus architecture rules. More than that, by adding flowers and cheap plastic objects she mocks them, the idealists.

The Museum of Everything is an amazing exhibition! To put a group of art works of each artist strengthens the presentation of each piece. Looking at these two pieces, I could feel the tortured world of the artist. Who, unfortunately, will stay anonymous for me since there was no label next to it.
Maybe he\she is lucky…in the whole exhibition not one label hung straight. Each one on a different height, sometimes the English text at the top and sometimes at the bottom. A pity that this part was not as serious as the exhibition itself.       

I don’t think that Barthelemy Toguo meant to test us with Rorschach inkblot test. Still I could see many different shapes; some were hidden and some strike straight away. So long as you look at it, you discover more about yourself, just like Rorschach inkblot.

The main impression I had from visiting the exhibition of  Ali Kazma in Akinci, was of a sensitive link that was created between his video art works. It took me few minutes to realize that they are all about handmade objects, about the process of creation: to make something with your hands that does not yet exist. Kazman kept these moments of creation pure, subtle and at the same time godly. 

This self-portrait of Paul Citroen makes it clear that the self-awareness of the “selfie” existed already in paintings. The facial expression, the posture and the clothes he choose to wear are all a statement: look at me, I’m here

This work of Dana Lixenbeg was one of those which broke my heart. Lixenbeg's "Slow Photography" makes you believe in photography and what is more, it makes you believe in people.

I think it was Susan Sontag who said that poverty, misery and war always photographed well. In the case of Letizia Battaglia’s work, the honest expression of people’s faces made me believe this time to the artist. The work is so emotional, it makes the cynicism disappear.

With this work of Julieta Aranda you could get the feeling of the nearby future. To me it looks like a head with its missing part completed by a 3D-printer. It is unclear whether a 3D printer will ever be able to print what is inside the head.

First Anne Wenzel creates perfect, beautiful ceramic flowers. After they are ready and fully blooming, she gives them life by slaughtering them.

With this work, the artist Chaim van Luit, created a symbol of the biblical burning bush. As written in the Bible, it is the revelation of God to Moses. There were very few times in which God revealed himself, but here, the artist made it possible for you, me and everyone else to face the burning light for as long as we want to.    

As fashion photography broadens, and its influence on the professionals is becoming stronger, its influence on the image we have human beings even more so. It was refreshing to see the humor in this work of Guda Koster.