Willem de Rooij: Crazy Repelled Firelight - Exhibition at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, NYC

NYC Contemporary Art Exhibition: Willem de Rooij, Crazy Repelled Firelight  

Friedrich Petzel Gallery, Chelsea, NYC

Crazy Repelled Firelight is a solo exhibition by Dutch artist Willem de Rooij in New York City at Friedrich Petzel Gallery.

Since 2007, Willem de Rooij has been producing abstract weavings that aim to generate meaning through the material they are made of, not through external references. The first weavings of this kind, originally produced for the 2009 Athens Biennale and shown in this exhibition, titled Silver to Gold (2009/2011). This artwork was industrially produced at Van Maele linen manufactures outside of Brussels and consists of five stretched pieces. The material developed for this work is a mixture of unbleached Belgian Linen and silver and gold-colored polyester threads. Through a step-by-step transition the monochromatic silver panels gradually change to gold through adjustments in the mixture.

Joining Silver to Gold in his exhibition, Willem de Rooij has produced four new handwoven works. These works show a gradual transformation in color through the production of the material they are made from. The first handwoven artwork, Black to Black (2011) gradates from shiny black to matte black. Rather than a treated surface, like that of a painting, this fabric panel is woven on a loom by placing black cotton lengthwise (the warp) and weaving 10 different mixtures of polyester sewing thread as well as reflecting synthetic strips crosswise (known as the woof). 

The second woven panel, Black to Brown (2011) also has a black cotton warp as a base that is then shot through with 10 different mixtures of black and brown polyester sewing thread, producing a slow gradation from black to brown. 

A third artwork, Digot Lovers (2011) an anagram of the words “silver to gold,” combines unbleached linen with silver and gold-colored polyester threads, gradating color from the unbleached linen to a combination of silver and gold thread which approach from either side of the lozenge. 

The fourth handwoven work on display, Mechanize Her Jenny (2011), is a pink monochrome produced from unbleached linen and a woof plied of 10 different shades of pink polyester sewing thread, so that the resulting image fluctuates in color depending on the physical position of the viewer. 

These four artworks were produced by Ulla Schünemann on a 200-year old loom at Handweberei Geltow outside Potsdam, Germany.

Willem de Rooij’s work is determined by the selection and combination of images in diverse media, such as sculpture, film, photography and text. His work analyzes the conventions of presentation and representation and assesses the tension between socio-political and autonomous image production. Where early film installations already had a sculptural quality, de Rooij's most recent exhibitions became works of art in their own right, often incorporating found materials or appropriated works of art. 

Bantar Gebang (2000), a 10-minute single take 35mm film, shows an early morning scene in a slum area in Jakarta, Indonesia. While the sun rises, the colors of the landscape are in constant flux. 

Orange (2004), a slideshow comprised of eighty-one 35mm slides that are all a different shade of orange, was shown at Friedrich Petzel Gallery in 2006. A wall text that accompanies this work associates prisoners’ attire on Guantanamo Bay with national identity in general and that of the Netherlands in particular. 

Bouquet V (2010) is a flower arrangement that exists of 95 different flowers, each individual species or type being present only once. 

Bouquet VI (2010) juxtaposes 100 black tulips with 100 white tulips. These works all test the capacity of supposedly objective entities (color, form, material) to simultaneously evoke and question social and political structures: difference, individuality, majority, change, and polarization. 

The notion of referentiality, and more specifically the development of strategies to bypass external references became important parameters in Willem de Rooij’s work over the last 5 years. Intolerance, shown at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in the autumn of 2010 is the most recent in a series of temporary sculptural installations that investigate whether it is possible to produce new works out of existing objects and artworks, rather than to use them as references.

SHORT BIOGRAPHY: WILLEM DE ROOIJ (born in 1969 in Beverwijk, Holland) studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Akademie in Amsterdam from 1990-95 and at the Rijksakademie from 1997-98. He has been a tutor at De Ateliers in Amsterdam since 2002 and Professor of Fine Arts at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main since 2006. De Rooij lives and works in Berlin. De Rooij worked and exhibited together with Jeroen de Rijke untill 2006, followed by exhibitions at K 21, Düsseldorf (2007) and at the Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (2008). He received a Robert Fulton Fellowship at Harvard University in 2004 and represented the Netherlands at the Venice Biennale in 2005. His works are in the collections of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, MUMOK, Vienna, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. De Rooij will participate in group exhibitions at the Kröller Möller Museum, Otterloo, the Centro Galego de Arte de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostella, and PS1, New York later this year. A new installation at Bentheim Castle, Gemany and a large solo exhibition at the Kunstverein Munich, Germany will open early October.

Friedrich Petzel Gallery is located at 535 & 537 West 22nd Street, in Chelsea between 10th and 11th Avenues, New York, NY 10011. 

Website: www.petzel.com

Johan van der Keuken - Wexner Center, Colombus - From The Body and the City

 Johan van der Keuken

From The Body and the City

Wexner Center, Colombus

September 18 – December 30, 2001

“Film is not life, but it has to touch your life. It’s a second life.”—Johan van der Keuken

An exhibition of multimedia works documenting street life in New York, Amsterdam, and Sarajevo by Dutch artist Johan van der Keuken opens at the Wexner Center this fall. Known for his exquisitely shot images of urban settings around the globe, van der Keuken had an astonishing career as a documentary filmmaker and photographer, working in virtually every part of the world. His gallery works, which combine film, photography, and sound, have never been shown in the United States. “The idea,” wrote the artist about these works, “is to use image, projection, sound, and visual instruments to create individual and distinct worlds and atmospheres.”

The three installations at the Wexner Center are part of the series The Body and the City, created in collaboration with designer Jeroen de Vries, who comes to the Wexner Center to help install the exhibition.

Reflecting Johan van der Keuken’s international perspective, the three installations on view here are New York/Colours on 42nd Street, Sarajevo/November 1993–November 1996, and Amsterdam/Two Streets. These works, all produced in 1998, consist of multiple photographs and moving images on film and video, focusing on the individual set against documentary backdrops of urban scenes. Wrote Artforum, these environments “draw visitors into and out of the exhibition space, to transform spectators into active participants, and, ultimately, to recall the violence and chaos of ‘what’s happening on the street.’”

In Johan van der Keuken’s own words, following are descriptions of the three installations:

• New York/Colours on 42nd Street, featuring a wall of 32 large-scale color photographs, plus film: “On 42nd Street between Times Square and Eight Avenue, I came across a long row of shops, their roll-down shutters all closed and painted in bright colors. I spent hours on the sidewalk across from the roll-down shutters, photographing passers-by walking past the fields of color. With their own bright colors, they seemed to represent an entire society. In the exhibition, the photographs are arranged adjacent to each other to form a huge mosaic of colour fields with people in them, one big human chessboard. A flat surface with the feeling: The Old New World: America!”

• Sarajevo/November 1993–November 1996, incorporating black-and-white photographs and film: “In November, 1993, my friend and colleague Frank Vellenga and I went to Sarajevo to show several films at the festival held there amidst Serbian gunfire and sniper ambushes. We also shot a 14-minute film showing moments in the day-to-day life of a city under siege with the underlying question: What purpose does it serve to make a film in wartime? Our main character was Marijela Margeta, an architecture student who risked her life to attend all the films at the festival.”

• Amsterdam/Two Streets, featuring two series of black-and-white photographs: “Two ‘lanes’ of photographs that are technically and aesthetically very different are confronted with each other. They run parallel or cross each other, much as streets do. On one lane, pictures of Dam Street can be seen through ‘holes’ in the black surface of the photographs like keyholes, so the view is largely restricted. Dam Street in the old center of Amsterdam is populated by an odd mixture of old timers, tourists, dropouts, junkies, and dealers. The opposite lane consists of pictures of Haarlemmerdijk. An old-fashioned shopping street now characterized by enormous mobility: stores, snack bars and coffee shops come and go, premises are constructed and demolished. I have photographed images of this street in layers one over the other, as multiple exposures with control and coincidence each playing an equal role.”

The Body and the City, a series of eight installations, has been exhibited in various combinations in Amsterdam, Paris, and Barcelona. New York’s Museum of Modern Art has hosted a retrospective of van der Keuken’s films this year, but his gallery installations have never before been exhibited in the United States.

Johan van der Keuken: From The Body and the City was curated by Bill Horrigan, the Wexner Center’s curator of media arts.

Johan van der Keuken (1938–2001) emerged as an artist in 1955 with the publication of his first photography collection, We Are 17. After studying film in Paris, he embarked on a career as a documentary filmmaker and photographer, working in virtually every part of the world with retrospectives in Montreal, Paris (at the Centre Georges Pompidou), and Holland. The artist became known for his evocative images and films that revealed an interest in the global circulation of capital, the erosion of traditional ways of life, the divide between rich and poor, racial and religious conflicts, and the place of chance and control in photography and film.

Jeroen de Vries has been compiling and designing innovative photo and media exhibitions for more than two decades, most recently in the cities of Belgrade and Porto. He designed the recent catalogue of Johan van der Keuken’s photographs, The Lucid Eye. He divides his time between Amsterdam and Belgrade.

WEXNER CENTER FOR THE ARTS

THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

1871 North High Street, Columbus, Ohio 43210

www.wexarts.org