Normally you are not allowed to touch works of art in museums. But that is precisely the intention with an exhibition in Assen. Vanderveen department store is full of works of art made by blind and partially sighted artists. Visitors can experience art through the eyes of a visually impaired person with special glasses.
Photos with bright colours, paintings in various styles and sculptures with unusual structures: pointed, smooth and rough. But also ceramics, paper art and sculptures. More than 50 works of art made by visually impaired artists are part of the exhibition ‘The art of seeing differently’. It is an initiative of the Drents Schildersgenootschap (DSG) and the KUBES foundation, which is committed to making art and culture accessible to the blind and partially sighted.
“This is a very special exhibition. You can touch a lot of works of art, so that you learn to experience art in a different way. It invites the visitor to think about art and feel it,” says DSG chairman Mark Lisser .
Roger Ravelli, one of the nineteen artists in the exhibition, knows how to experience art when you barely see it. The visual artist has macular degeneration, a progressive eye disease. “The central part of my vision is decreasing every year. Normally this condition occurs in older people, but I have a rare form that caused me to get it at a young age. I was diagnosed when I was 43. I was scared to death says the artist.
Accepting his declining eyesight was a long process. “When I was diagnosed, I wanted to give it a place. You then wonder how to deal with it and then I found out that sculpting suits me,” he explains.
He tries to portray his struggle with his works of art. One of his statues, with a smooth side and rough top, symbolizes the feeling he got when he was diagnosed. “And the image is skewed, which makes it look like it had been hit. That shows how I felt at the time.”
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