Maarten Ploeg

Painting was rediscovered in the exhilarating 1980s. Maarten Ploeg (1958 – 2004) caused a sensation as an artist and musician at the time. He was awarded the Royal Prize for Painting in 1982, and in the late 1980s he emerged as a pioneer of computer art. Yet his name is not well known and little of his work is held in museum collections. The 1980s are associated above all with artists like René Daniëls, Rob Scholte and Marlene Dumas, but there was a lot more going on besides. The work of Maarten Ploeg is of a very high standard and played a much greater role than previously thought. It is the job of a museum to correct such omissions, so Kunstmuseum Den Haag is proud to host the first retrospective of his work since his untimely death in 2004.

“What do I want for my art? The same thing I want in life! Excitement & calm, love & hate, order & chaos, success & deception. Basically EVERYTHING, so NOTHING. So ‘my art’ isn’t going to take me anywhere; I will simply go somewhere and then move on from there”, Ploeg wrote during his time as a student at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. In the same piece, he described ‘tradition’ as nothing more than a series of pictures gathered by art historians, and things in books at museums. He wondered what had been left out. Kunstmuseum Den Haag bought work by Ploeg in the 1980s. “This exhibition will demonstrated that Maarten Ploeg absolutely deserves a place in Dutch art history”, says director Benno Tempel.

Search for abstraction
The exhibition at Kunstmuseum Den Haag will feature a cross-section of his entire body of work. As well as seventy paintings, it will also include videos and abstract video art. In his early days as an artist Ploeg was one of the Neue Wilde, making neo-expressionist work that was raw and colourful. Later, he developed his own unique visual idiom, richly imaginative and often humorous. Ploeg was in search of abstraction, often opting for vibrant colours and simple, largely geometric shapes. The digital forms he later discovered in his computer art influenced his painting. In contrast to the dominant trend at the time, his work grew more abstract, encompassing elements of De Stijl, Picasso and cubism, and suprematism (Paul Mansouroff). Ploeg never achieved full abstraction in his paintings. A face always crept in somehow, as he said himself at the time.

Groundbreaking video art
From 1987 Ploeg explored the potential of the Amiga computer, the first home multimedia computer. He actually used it as a new way of painting, and this did enable him to create fully abstract images. This took his career to a new visual and substantive heights, and served as an inspiration to many new computer and video artists. His Ophthalmology series (1992 – 1995) is like a sensual hypnotic journey through the visual brain of the computer. Ploeg’s computer art could be viewed at night on Park 4DTV, which he had helped to launch in 1991, after previously making innovative TV for the pirate broadcaster P.K.P. TV and the Avro and VPRO broadcasting organisations. At a time when it was unusual for computer art to reach a wide audience, Ploeg managed to achieve just that, broadcasting on local television channels in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Berlin and New York, and on the internet.

Big role for music
Music had played a big role in Ploeg’s life since the 1970s, and he was a member of three bands. He founded the successful art punk band Soviet Sex with Peter Klashorst; his brother Rogier and, later, singer Ellen ten Damme and painter Bart Domburg were also members. Ploeg was the singer and guitarist in Interior, Blue Murder and Astral Bodies. Their videos bear the clear hallmarks of a visual artist, with Maarten moving around the sets like a Dutch David Byrne, the Talking Heads’ frontman. The exhibition will include a compilation of music videos with art direction by Ploeg.

Maarten Ploeg (whose name was actually Maarten van der Ploeg) trained in the audiovisual department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, where he met his partner Ryu Tajiri. He later continued his training at Ateliers ’63. Ploeg was awarded the Royal Prize for Painting in 1982 and in 1985 received the Prix de Rome basic prize for painting. He started teaching at the Formerly Audiovisual department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in 1991, where he and Peter Mertens established the MediaLab workshop and introduced the Amiga computer.

The exhibition is being organised in collaboration with the Maarten Ploeg Trust.
A publication on the artist’s life and work, PLOEG + WERK 1958-2004, is available at the museum shop.