- Collaboration: Niels Broszat & Har Vander Put
- Location: Pictura / Dordrecht
- Date: 2018
Concept:
Invited by Niels Broszat, an artist in the role of curator, Niek Schoenmakers, a curator in the role of an artist, created two installations. These installations are a visual conversation with the paintings by Har van der Put. Van der Put paints gloomy interior spaces, not based on a actual environment but purely made with his own fantasy. They are sketches and impressions of space, rather then actual places. The installations by Niek try to do the reverse: taking actual objects and by intervening with their chapes, reduce them to sketches.
For the realisation of these two installations, Niek used his personal collection of chairs as a startingpoint. The objects with which Niek surrounds himself are the strongest expression of his view to world, appreciation spatial concepts, history and use of material. The chair collection is a big part of that, so it was a natural step to use this as his medium for the installations. The chairs range from the first designicoon he bought, only 17 year old, to the latest creating by a young designers.
The first installation investigates the sculptural quality of some of the most famous icons in Western design history: the Panton chair (Verner Panton), the Butterfly chair (Arne Jacobsen), the Tulip Chair (Eero Saarinen) and the Plastic Chair (Charles & Ray Eames). By covering them with a thin sheet of plastic, used to protect objects when painting, their shapes are visible but their presence is reduced to a glimpse. It’s an invitation for the view to re-evalute the object and the space it occupies.
The second installation is a composition of 9 chairs, places in rows of 3. Every row has a different story to tell: material, shape and construction. By intervening with these chairs by covering pieces with transparant material, the viewer is challenged to take a closer look. Why are these chairs related and what is the story they tell?