Something special is going on with Tot Zover, the only museum in the Netherlands about death. It is as if the location of this modest building, namely the Amsterdam cemetery De Nieuwe Ooster, injects all the works of art on display with extra meaning. In the vicinity of the Grim Reaper you quickly start to associate about mortality, mourning and loss. Rich themes in which you – in fortunate circumstances – do not stand still every day, but which go particularly well with art.
The environment also plays its part in the imaginative paintings by the German artist Sarah Grothus (1984). Grothus paints large canvases full of veiled layers of color from which tenuous figures emerge. She pulls you into another world, but what kind of world that is remains uncertain. There are no recognizable spaces or landscapes, no objects that betray a place or time. Yet your thoughts go into the exhibition Twilight immediately in one direction: is this the afterlife? Or a limbo of hell?
ambiguity
Both are possible. This ambiguity means that you can keep looking at these paintings endlessly. One moment they seem fairytale, the next horrific. This ambiguity is, among other things, in the figures that reside in the interspaces. Sometimes they are painted so thinly that they are reminiscent of ghosts or elves. In other places they look more like medieval devils, or Gollum’s brothers and sisters Under the spell of the ring† They are not old and not young, not really human, but not animal either. They seem to embrace each other, or do they grab each other by the throat?
Grothus is at her best in that in-between area. In the front room starts Twilight very powerful; there hangs the dramatic The ghosts are with us (2020), a painting measuring 3 by more than 7 metres. The intense colors contribute to the uncertain atmosphere. In the lower half of the canvas, azure blue contrasts with grubby earth tones. At the top, soft sunset tones merge with toxic orange. Add to that the fact that this painting is placed in front of a window, so that the light from outside shines through the paint. It’s like the sky is on fire.
On the way to the second room you will come across the eye-catcher of the exhibition: a section of the corridor has been converted into an elongated coffin with painted walls. The feeling you get when you walk through that tunnel is at once secure and oppressive – again that ambiguity. Yet the exhibition here gradually loses some of its power.
Where the figures could previously be interpreted in different ways, the link with death here is very literal. Starting, of course, with the coffin shape of the tunnel. The paintings on the walls of the coffin and in the last room are still impressive, but significantly less subtle. Indefinite fantasy creatures give way to skulls and skeletons. That is the disadvantage of this museum. Art that already very literally refers to death runs the risk of being a bit flat here.
Sarah Grothus, Twilight† Until 27/3, Museum Tot Zover, Amsterdam.
