15 December 2007 till 03 February 2008

7-up

Persbeeld tentoonstelling 7-up

7-up
7-up is an exhibition of work by seven up-and-coming artists who all graduated this year from the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague. Wim van Krimpen, Director of the Gemeentemuseum, has selected Lilian Kreutzberger, Wieteke Heldens, Rosa Boekhorst, Niels Broszat, Isabella Rozendaal, Helgi Kristinsson and Sooreh Hera, each of whom will be allocated a separate space in which to show his or her work.

Artists
Lilian Kreutzberger produces paintings and drawings of interiors and exteriors. Her work shows her fascination with the beauty of spaces in which human vulnerability and pain are a tangible presence. Kreutzberger also has a painting on show in this year’s Royal Award exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum, which runs until 6 January 2008.

Wieteke Heldens will use her space in the museum to show several installations reflecting her personal experience of anorexia and bulimia. To help convey this experience to the viewer, she uses statistics and a down-to-earth form of logic: a rational method of presentation that is painfully at odds with the emotional reality for people suffering from these eating disorders.

Rosa Boekhorst aims to trigger a playful interaction between the portrait and the view: who is looking at whom? Her portraits are a plea for openness. They present themselves to the viewer’s gaze but also gaze back. Her (soft porn) drawings are deliberately contradictory: the facial expressions in them are clearly out of keeping with the overt sexuality of the poses.

Niels Broszat paints opulent portraits of flowers which are reminiscent of seventeenth-century still lifes. He welds together extremes: exuberant baroque with old-fashioned kitsch, light with heavy, beautiful with ugly, etc. At times Broszat also turns his classical flower pictures inky black and paints them on pieces of torn and taped-together paper rather than on canvas; the past and present co-exist in them.

Isabella Rozendaal’s photographs are about the Dutch and their obsessive love of animals. In shows and competitions, in the bedroom and the back garden, from baby kittens to ancient mongrels, animals are frequently an integral part of the Dutch family. Rozendaal reveals this truth in tragicomic mode.

Helgi Kristinsson has made sound recordings in various parts of the museum and brought them together to form an installation. Globes emitting these sounds are scattered randomly about the floor of the gallery. If you pick them up, you can feel the vibrations caused by the sound waves and get a completely new experience of the place you are in.

Sooreh Hera’s photographs examine the fact that the three great religions of the western world have always been fiercely opposed to every alternative form of sexuality. In the Islamic world, homosexuality is still punishable by death. Sooreh herself comes from an Islamic country but nonetheless produces photographs that represent homosexuality in every conceivable manner.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue (€ 7,-).