[NEDxPO2018] Still/Life – Contemporary Dutch Photography

NEDxPO2018 will begin with ‘Still/Life – Contemporary Dutch Photography’ on 3rd May. The Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Korea and the Korea Foundation co-host the exhibition entitled “Still/Life – Contemporary Dutch Photography” at the KF Gallery from 3 to 30 May.

(This exhibition is admission free.)

Opening Reception

Date: 2nd May 4:00 PM

Location: KF Gallery

Curator Talk <On the Photographical Still Life>

Date: 3rd May 19:00PM

Location: KF Gallery

<On the Photographical Still Life>

For a long time the genre of the Still Life was considered to be a typical painterly one. Especially in the so-called Golden Age of the Dutch Low Lands (the 17th century) paintings of still lifes flourished. From the dawn of photography the still life became also an important photographical theme – and this has been the case up to the present day.

But what defines a still life? This seems to be an easy question to answer, but at second thought this might not be the case. For some photographers the still life is a way of creating images of arranged beauty that rely heavily on pre-production: the setting up and lighting of a group of diverse or related inanimate objects. Some still life photographs, though, are discovered rather than arranged.

With the works included in the exhibition Still/Life – contemporary Dutch Photography at a starting point Foam’s artistic director Marcel Feil will shed a clarifying light on the notion and understanding of the still life while providing additional background information on the participating artist.

• Marcel Feil, Deputy Director of Foam

Marcel Feil (1968) is the Deputy Director for Artistic Affairs at Foam in Amsterdam. After studying History of Art at the University of Amsterdam, he worked at the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture for four years. The next four years he was a staff member of the Amsterdam Centre for Photography, curating small exhibitions with works of young emerging photographers and organizing lectures and educational programs. Since 2002, he worked as curator at Foam and organized a wide range of historical and contemporary photography exhibitions, varying from solo exhibitions to group shows and theme exhibitions. He is also one of the editors of Foam Magazine, the international photography magazine published by Foam. Since the beginning of 2010, he has been Foam’s deputy director, responsible for all artistic affairs. Recently, he curated the William Klein Retrospective, shown at Foam in 2014, and the Helmut Newton Retrospective in 2016.

Registration in advance is required for the curator talk. You can register HERE.

The meaning of Dutch Still Life

This exhibition presented focuses on the still life, a key subject in the history of Dutch art as a whole. Contemporary photographers continue to experiment on the theme of this classic genre in European painting, revising all the known canons, devising complex combinations with traditional motifs and literally assessing the viability of the academic genre in present-day artistic practice.

Potato, 2003 (c) Anuschka Blommers en Niels Schumm

The Potatoes series by Anuschka Blommers and Niels Schumm, for example, is far from classic, but instead starkly graphic – and due to its subject matter also very Dutch. The works on view in the exhibition range from those based on classic themes (flower and fruit still lifes), to modern interpretations of the vanitas symbols (constructions with objects that refer to our everyday surroundings) to nearly abstract, three-dimensional still lifes in the exhibition space.

It is unlikely that the viewer today requires a dictionary of symbolism to decipher each still life element, as was the case in the 17th or 18th century, combining the letters like a child to read the whole, to determine the meaning of an allegorical scene. Contemporary photographers appeal not to our ability to ‘read’, but to our visual experience, the eye’s heightened sensitivity, the ability to react to forms, colours, the architectonics of depiction, the balance between emptiness and density. As if photographers were testing themselves with the sterility and extreme simplicity of the situation – background/object/camera, and in this case even the most banal everyday item becomes a focus of close scrutiny, in an examination of minute detail.

We see a certain volume and palpate it like a sculpture, but with our eyes; we operate with the physical characteristics of density, of reflective capacity and porosity, and finally the photograph eliminates and replaces the reality of a three-dimensional object, transformed into more convincing evidence of reality than the thing itself.  As history demonstrates, paradox is more than productive, and hence the legendary Bernd and Hilla Becher were awarded a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for sculpture, rather than photography.

Dutch photographers venture even further, subjecting that which is naturally dynamic, fluctuating or devoid of definitive and solid form to the laws of statics and immobility. The photographs of Johannes Schwartz, Elspeth Diederix and Ingmar Swalue capture a thing poured or crumpled that becomes no more and no less than a participant in the chromatic and spatial composition, disrupting our tactile orientation and altogether confusing our sense organs. The arbitrary and involuntary aspects of photography are suppressed as the photographic vision extends to every corner of the picture, in the same way as in classic Dutch still life (three 17th-century still life paintings from the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts are included in the exhibition).

Balancing Orange, Pink and Yellow , 2008 (c) Qiu Yang

Vacant photographic images providing maximal description of the physical essence of the subject, and at the same time possessing universal characteristics like an abstract linguistic unit – a phoneme, find a tendency towards alignment in groups, classification in a catalogue of sorts, as in the series of Marianne Vierø and Diana Scherer. In the photographs presented by this exhibition there is a specific archive of reality, an impartially assembled row of objects, a self-absorbed order that keeps aggressive reality at a respectful distance. This photographic vacuum expresses the maximally concentrated and almost meditative state of the artist, who is not protecting himself from the outside world but finding in himself the strength to make ironic comment on the chaos of the surrounding world, the extreme density of visual impressions that merge into one endlessly fluctuating image.

Lennart and Sander, The Procrastinators performed by Frank Houtappels

Another type of irony is demonstrated by the video works of Dutch artists, where, as you might expect, the leading character is an object that undergoes various physical and semantic manipulations. For example, a video by Lennart and Sander shows the same group of objects for 10 minutes, while an off-screen voice impassively intones a chronicle of procrastination, endlessly avoiding any course of action. Thereby the sheet of paper, pencil and glass of wine become practically the only foothold for reality, a point of imaginary concentration and in fact a hypnotic pendulum that gently attunes the spectator to the wavelength of an idler, completely engrossing us with a succession of inane and haphazard thoughts.

The flower still lifes by Scheltens & Abbenes are close to being intoxicating. The intense colours seduce the viewer and pull one into the image. They are more explicit than 17th-century still lifes, in which the painters gathered their floral bouquets from far and wide, and from various seasons as well – idealised bouquets that could never have really existed. But Scheltens & Abbenes never try to pull the wool over our eyes. The strong two-dimensionality and graphic quality reveal that what we see here is a constructed bouquet.

For ‘Fake Flowers in Full Colour’ (2009), Jaap Scheeren and Hans Gremmen bought some fake flowers and paint and took a photo of this bouquet. They then broke down the image into four colour separations: cyan, magenta, yellow and black. They placed the bouquets in these four colours in the studio again and re-photographed them. In theory, if these images were laid over each other, the archetypal image would be recreated. It is interesting to observe how the duo plays with our belief in photography as a faithful reproduction of reality and with colour as an essential component of this.

The photos seen in Still/ Life are no longer ‘taken’ (as an imprint of reality), but are ‘made’ (staged and composed in their entirety). Subject and object converge and exist only in relation to each other. Whether the final result is purely a photo, a video or an installation, in all cases the form and the content have been entirely orchestrated by the creator. The photographers enter into relationships with other expressions of visual art in constructing their images, such as performance, video, installation and sculpture.

The new generation of Dutch artists brought together focus their attention, in the same way as their great predecessors once did, on the physical object in its indisputability. Feeling for the delicate link with tradition, they convey new functions to the object, investigate diverse possibilities and finally restore its primary value, preventing it from dissolving in the vanity of this passing world, that crazy torrent of actual reality that makes no allowance for intermissions, silence, contemplation and real visual involvement.

Collection of Sleepings and Awakings I, 2008 (c) Kim Boske