Quinda Verheul (32): ‘For me, gold is a symbol of the human yearning for luxury’
The Sound of Silence, Root Gallery in Rotterdam, until 12/2.
Anyone who is allowed to make an exhibition at Root Gallery, a young, ambitious gallery in Rotterdam-West, has to work – and not just a little bit. Of course there are handy works of art on the wall for sale, but the main room always contains a temporary installation with museum potential.
Right up the alley of Quinda Verheul. ‘I like to make great works, it’s fantastic to show what I can do. Root is not a traditional gallery; with Yvonne de Jong, the gallery owner, you can embark on crazy adventures. She is not easily scared of a challenge. She wants to grow together with her artists.’
Quinda Verheul is inspired by landscapes for her small wall sculptures and large installations. How they change under the influence of wind, erosion and sun, and by human action, such as in the extraction of copper ore and other minerals.
‘I am fascinated by open pit mining, of those immense quarries. As humans, we can create craters. It is almost land art, but at the same time it is commercial exploitation. After all, an excavated mountain will never come back and that has something terrifying about it.’
Her recent works are about sand. ‘We use it extensively for concrete, fiberglass, computers and even silicone shoe soles. Usable sand is becoming scarce worldwide. I try to convert that political side of sand into something aesthetic.’
For the exhibition in Root Gallery she brought almost 3 cubic meters of sand to the sixth floor with the help of a removal lift. When you walk through the room, the sand rains from bins on the ceiling. Oval, gold-coloured mirrors reflect the visitors.
Gold is a recurring element in Quinda Verheul’s work. ‘Grain was our first money, and it is also a basic necessity of life. We find gold a valuable material, although you can’t make many necessary things out of it. To me, gold symbolizes the human yearning for luxury.’
You don’t have to be so aware of all those aspects when you go through the The Sound of Silence running, she emphasizes. “You can also just enjoy it.”
Reinoud Oudshoorn (69): ‘In the gallery the works start a conversation with each other, you stand there listening to them as a spectator’
Recent sculptures, Gallery Ramakers in The Hague, until 13/2.
Reinoud Oudshoorn is fine with the fact that a large festive opening is not possible. ‘Vernissages are the worst time to look at art and the worst time to talk about your work.’ Of course it’s nice that people come to watch, although that comes second to him. ‘Setting up is number one, because then the sculptures will lead a life of their own, separate from the making process.’
Only in the gallery can he distance himself from his art, explains Oudshoorn. ‘In other words: the works distance themselves from me. I suddenly have nothing to do with it anymore. The works enter into a conversation with each other, you stand to listen to it as a spectator.’
He makes ‘drawings in space’, between a flat surface and sculpture. Shapes with a perspective and vanishing point, made of wood, steel and frosted glass. ‘My greatest desire is to create a spatial experience. Everyone knows the magic of walking through the fog. As a child, if I had an empty piece of paper and a pencil, it became an infinite space.’
In order for the works to ‘talk’ to each other, the eye of the artist and the gallery owner is required. Everything hangs on a ‘horizon’ at a height of 1.65 meters. ‘It has to become a unit. The trap of making an exhibition is that you are filling empty walls.’
This combination has a drawback. ‘At a group exhibition or a trade fair it is clearer that you can buy the individual works. With a solo in a gallery, visitors are often impressed by the whole. They almost seem to forget that you can give a work a place in your home.’
Reinoud Oudshoorn has been working on his new sculptures for two years. He survived the corona crisis just fine. “I am ashamed to confess that a lockdown is my natural state. You can neglect your family and friends without feeling too much guilt, I prefer to go to my studio every day.’ The ‘most beautiful moment’ has now arrived, because the space is completely empty. ‘All potential. I can start again.’
Magali Reus (40): ‘Thanks to the phone book I had found a ‘space’ in Dallas to show my work’
Shadow Tonics, Gallery Fons Welters in Amsterdam, until 26/2.
In the first lockdown of 2020, Magali Reus stayed in The Hague with her mother. During a walk, her mother came across a field of fly agarics, the mushroom from fairy tales, red with white dots. The photos Magali Reus took of it would be the start of a series of works that is now on display and for sale at Galerie Fons Welters.
‘It was dusk and my mother illuminated the fly agaric with the flashlight of her telephone’, Reus tells the Amsterdam gallery about that first photo. “I brought a light pink T-shirt as a background that I bought in 2019 at a thrift store in Dallas. There I was in preparation for an exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center. Unfortunately, it was postponed due to the pandemic.’
When she was back in London, where she lives and works, she came across the photos again in the winter. Reus, winner of the Prix de Rome 2015, decided to photograph more mushrooms. ‘But we also had a lockdown in England at the time, which made it difficult to look for them outside in nature. I then bought a range of exotic and seasonal mushrooms online, as well as a range of vintage Texas T-shirts.”
The cancellation of the Dallas exhibition and the isolation due to the pandemic frustrated her, but also gave Reus an idea. She bought an old American telephone directory from the Park Cities neighborhood of Dallas on eBay, had all those pages scanned, and turned it into a new book of her mushroom series.
‘In this way I had found a ‘space’ in Dallas to show my work’, says Magali Reus about the book published in December Park Cities – Knaves. ‘Moreover, a telephone book is a network for communication, comparable to the mycelium, the network of all the fungal threads from which mushrooms originate.’
The photos in the gallery are mounted on aluminum plates, which in turn are fixed to steel panels in large welded containers, framed by enlargements of soil and manure bags. At Galerie Fons Welters they are shown in combination with her sculptures. The mushrooms will still be on display in Dallas this spring.