These are the shows I reviewed for ArtSlant‘s Gallery Hop in February 2011.
Pieter Lemmens, Quality, Politics & Society @ Nieuw Dakota, Amsterdam
Dominik Borkowski @ Ververs Gallery, Amsterdam
Sven Kroner, The Air Was Magic When We Played @ Fons Welters Gallery, Amsterdam
Anouk Kruithof, Check/ double Check, 2010
The piece that most represents my idea of art, or at least of the way it affects our perception, is Martin Creed’s Work No. 227, The Lights Going On and Off (2000). Whether installed in a corridor or a room, the piece de facto works as a frame for whatever else is there, from the bare walls to other artworks. As the craft of an artist has now become scattered across all sorts of media, the capability of framing a world into another has emerged as an important heritage of conceptual practices. What is art if not a way of looking at things a little more closely?
Anouk Kruithof‘s work is all about the framing. Her language is simple and light like the materials she uses, ranging from postcards to stacks of paper, newspapers, books and prints. She takes photos and transfers the images across different surfaces and spaces, composing spatial mnemonic theaters in the form of minimal installations.
What makes Kruithof’s works different from pure conceptual speculations about the act of art creation is the affection for the tactile and sharing dimension of the pieces, as well as a longing for perpetual memory. We are not talking about semiotics, but rather of the human mind, with its pulsating emotions and seizing logic co-existing together.
After seeing Anouk’s work at the Adler Gallery booth at ART Rotterdam, where she also won the Illy prize, I sent her a few questions about her practice. The following is the exchange that took place.
(Originally posted on Ymag)
It’s not a surprise. After information, street maps, and books, Google is at it again. This time the Mountain View giant has chosen art, and recently launched Google Art Project, an innovative platform that offers both a – still not perfect – pseudo-3D navigation of the world’s biggest art institutions and an impressively detailed view of some of the main pieces in their collection. So far the list features the MoMA, the Tate Britain, the Uffizi, the Van Gogh, and several others, but we can expect it to grow in the future.
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