Stijn ter Braak built a copy of his bathroom from waste, and that is a huge kick

With the art of Stijn ter Braak (26) looking out loud comes naturally, I noticed. In mid-December (when it was still allowed) I was in the gallery of Mieke van Schaijk in Den Bosch where Ter Braaks installed my bathroom is set up. To me it sounded like this: ‘Oh no, wow that toothbrush! The toiletry bag! Oh, that shampoo, how good, I totally recognize it! And what about those tiles?’ The gallery owner: ‘Also counterfeit.’ The oppressively small pink bathroom is a copy of the young artist’s bathroom, made from scrap materials and paint. The details are amazing, the amount of handiwork is insane. “Aah, the mirror is real,” I continued. The gallery owner did not answer. Moments later, I gasped.

I have to stop here. I’ve never had this before. Not just that I don’t come across the best artwork of the year until December. But above all: a work of art with a plot twist. Am I going to spoiler it now? Am I going to ruin it for you?

What you should in any case know about Stijn ter Braak is the following. Ter Braak is a Dutch artist, he lives in Antwerp, where he was trained as a painter. In February last year, he came up with the completely bizarre idea of ​​making his own household effects from waste products. That grew into an installation entitled My living room, the result of months of diligent tinkering: a sofa, a rug, a laundry rack, a bookcase with contents, well, you know what the living room of a twenty-something looks like. All that, but a bit wobbly, because it is made of painted cardboard.

A little later Ter Braak opened a webshop to sell his stuff, the counterfeit versions. For example worn a piece’right shoe‘ for 699.99 euros, made of cardboard, cloth, glue, aluminum paper, acrylic, paper tape, flower, carpet and pencil. Then it was the turn of the bathroom to be copied, the result is in Den Bosch.

Bedroom

When I am with Ter Braak in his Antwerp studio at the end of December, I see that he has not been sitting still. He now ventures into his bedroom, which he has also given a strange twist, as if imitation is not strange enough. I have made an appointment with Ter Braak because I want to know why he imitates all his stuff. But also because I can’t figure out how to write about his bathroom: can I reveal the surprise, that twist that still scares me when I think about it?

In view of the pace at which he makes art, Ter Braak must be fanatical, almost obsessed or possessed. Yet he speaks calmly, thoughtfully. He comes from Groningen, but his accent has already swung southwards towards Antwerp in recent years. His father is a painter, his mother a music teacher. He wasn’t pushed to do anything artistic, he says, but discovered painting himself when he was about 14 years old: ‘I just started painting what I saw, so I made self-portraits, for example. Also out of boredom, I found my school quite boring.’

He also did less well-behaved adolescents. For example, he sprayed graffiti with a friend. But with a quasi-philosophical twist: ‘Then we sprayed ‘Why?’ on a garbage can or viaduct’. Pretty lame, he thinks now, although he understands why he chose street art: ‘I thought it was a shame that art is shown in exclusive spaces, it is difficult to really surprise people there. That’s why I found it more interesting to make something in places where people wouldn’t expect it.’

With the same thought, he made a small oil painting as a 17-year-old on an ugly piece of wall between a row of garages in Groningen. That self-portrait still stands there: “It’s been treated surprisingly respectfully all along.”

After VWO, Ter Braak chose to study painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. It is a sound technical and formal training. ‘The first two years are a kind of boot camp, almost 19th century, those years I only had to paint still lifes, portraits and nudes.’

When he quickly scrolls through the paintings he made at art school on his computer, it is striking how many painting styles he masters: sometimes very precise, sometimes carelessly, sometimes with oil paint, then acrylic paint, sometimes very realistic, then flat and cartoonish. He was searching and super productive. Variety was part of it: ‘People are quick to put you in a box, I always tried to get out of that. At one point it almost felt like a game.’

He learned to paint well at the art academy, when he graduated he won the first prize in the painting category, but after the academy he concluded himself: ‘I am not a painter, this is not quite it.’ He watched as some of his classmates continued painting, heading for gallery exhibitions and museums. Ter Braak dived into the nightlife, he worked in a jazz café: ‘I had a studio up there for a while, but that didn’t work. I sat like a lonely quasimodo bent over a painting while I heard people having fun downstairs. Or then they called me: can you come and help?’

He gave up that studio, but not the art completely. He tinkered with small airbrush paintings and gave art lessons to children: ‘That was a cheap after-school care, many of those children had little interest in art. I often felt mainly like a police officer.’

But unexpectedly, during another ‘lesson’ that he had barely prepared, something special happened: ‘A group of boys, about eight years old, decided to make a sculpture together. That happened very quickly, with everything they found: toilet rolls, wood, even things that were not intended for them at all. An hour and a half later there was a very good abstract sculpture. I went home that day with the idea: I want to hold on to that energy, that’s how I want to work, so uncomplicated and spatial. But where do you start?’

glue gun

Just at home on the couch, as it turned out. Ter Braak had just moved and was living alone for the first time, without roommates: ‘That was new to me, a living room full of my own things, which I had collected over time.’ A strange sensation: ‘That evening I was looking at all that stuff and I thought: what is it all about? I felt a strange distance. And suddenly I had an image in my head that all that stuff would double and the room would grow completely closed.’ That sounds like a movie scene and it is, Ter Braak: ‘I think there is a safe in a Harry Potter film in which everything doubles automatically, like pouf, pouf, pouf.’

It was not that easy with a magic spell for Ter Braak: ‘I had never made a sculpture before, I actually thought I couldn’t do that at all.’ Fortunately, a few months earlier, he had bought a glue gun to build a Santa Claus surprise. And that same evening he made a doppelganger of his simple standing Ikea lamp with the help of found PVC pipes. He immediately experienced the effect of such a counterfeit thing: ‘It caused something strange in my head, it is very recognizable and in the meantime also waste. What is a lamp if it is not a lamp, has no function? Is it immediately a work of art?’

So that left me wanting more. He copied his guitar, a beer crate, the table, the rug. Pretty soon the small living room closed up, as he’d imagined. Fortunately, the artist found a large studio nearby. The day after he received the key, the first lockdown in Belgium was announced. Ter Braak realized that he now had an ideal lockdown project: ‘And I had so much fun with it as I had hardly ever had before.’

Sometimes people really fall for it, he soon noticed. For example, a buyer reported for his counterfeit lamp via Instagram. “I’m looking for another lamp,” she wrote to him. He had to disappoint her. A number of the many cores he made (99.99 euros each in the webshop) were intercepted by cleaners at the owners and put in the trash. Appropriate, because he makes these works of art from waste: ‘I have found all the material that I use, often around here, have you seen those piles of bulky waste?’ It is a shame to buy the materials, according to the artist, for the money and for the environment.

Transformation

For five months Ter Braak worked on his living room at an insanely fast pace: ‘Then I thought: now I’m going to do something else.’ But soon after, Ter Braak was given an exhibition opportunity at the Lichtekooi art space in Antwerp. That’s how the idea of ​​copying his bathroom came about: ‘Just one more, I thought.’ In the meantime, it’s the bedroom’s turn: ‘For me, the magic is in the transformation, when something changes before your eyes into something else.’ It’s the magic of the trompe l’oeil, with which painters have fooled us for centuries: ‘That’s the thrill, that one moment when a piece of cardboard suddenly becomes a rug. That’s the mystery of making.’

And exactly that kick, that mystery, he has brilliantly incorporated into his bathroom artwork, without deviating from the original idea: to imitate something in a different material. He was inspired in the shower, he says: ‘I was looking at the mirror and then I came to it. But I didn’t know how it would turn out yet.’ Like a sledgehammer, I can now testify. Ter Braak blurs the line between real and unreal until you start to doubt yourself.

When the bathroom was first exhibited in Belgium, the artist was keen that no one would reveal that surprise. He is still hesitant: ‘I would rather not describe it point by point in the newspaper. But it is good when people know that there is something to discover. It’s a multi-layered experience… that you have to peel off, as it were.’ Voilà, you can do that yourself, so as soon as the weather is possible.