Ronit Eden. Concept & Spatial Design offers curatorship and exhibition design

Notes Concerning the Past

Armando museum, Amersfoort, 2011
Works of Armando and Reli Avrahami, (in cooperation with Yvonne Ploum, director of Armando Museum), curatorship and exhibition design

About the Exhibition

The exhibition juxtaposes photographs of visual artist Reli Avrahami (Israel, 1960) with works of Armando (Amsterdam, 1929). The museum’s mission includes showcasing other artists whose work bears a relationship in form, idea or method to Armando’s oeuvre.

Armando is one of the most famous Dutch artists alive. All his work circles around the major themes of his childhood: his experiences as a young boy in the Second World War. Despite the biographical roots of much of his work, Armando isn't looking for anecdotes or stories about his own past. For Armando war is a universal human thing, in his work he transposes the personal story to the existential one. He paints and draws archetypical figures: flags, crosses, trees, ladders. But not like the ones we may use in our daily lives. Armando's figures bear a history, they refer to a guilty past.

In this exhibitionare two series of photographs of Reli Avrahami that become here into one story: the first one is a series of the family in daily live that was taken by the artist since 2006. The second one is a series that was taken in 2008 while Avrahami made a “roots trip” with her mother and her sisters in Netherland. The aim of the trip was, to visit the places that the mother was hidden and was saved during the 2nd World War. On each work the artist add details about the figures, by that they are not anymore anonymous.

From Armando there are drawings and paintings that incorporate old photographs or postcards. In Armando's oeuvre the drawings on photography -starting off in the early seventies - are of special importance. Armando carves and leaves traces on 1930's postcards found on German flea markets. He leaves his marks on photos from the landscape surrounding the Concentration Camp in Amersfoort in which vicinity he grew up. He works with photos of soldiers taken from history books. By carving tensed lines, Armando comments on history. Although he knows it has no point, he still tries to fight time, to regenerate a past that's gone forever.

Avrahami and Armando are similarly focused on issues related to memory, such as the erosion of matter, the desire for closure, the constructed nature of the narrative, the instability of historical truth, and the working through of trauma in art. Both artists leave on personal notes on their photographs, they ‘add’ information to the viewer to understand better and to make the past present again.