The work of the raw artist Zoro Feigl also evokes a wow feeling in a polished museum ★★★★☆

Is this a work of art by Zoro Feigl? When first installed in Sun spark spray the doubt strikes. You expect movement and spectacle, and you get a circular ‘pool’ of steel containing a motionless, mirror-smooth black liquid. But then it comes: with a deep hum the cylinder starts to move. Fascinated, you keep watching as the black liquid forms a vortex, comes to a halt, and gently ripples.

When you think of Zoro Feigl, you think of machines. Sputtering machines, roaring machines. Since graduating from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in 2007, Feigl has been creating a furore with cool art: mechanically driven installations made of industrial materials such as rubber, tarpaulin and fire hoses. He exhibited in Istanbul, Beijing, Berlin and Moscow, and was awarded several times.

Until now, Feigl has mainly had solo exhibitions in unpolished places that matched the experimental, mad-inventor-like nature of his art. In 2018, for example, he transformed the monumental Electricity Factory in The Hague into one large playground. Sun spark spray in Stedelijk Museum Schiedam is his first museum solo exhibition, and also the first exhibition after the museum has been closed for renovation for a year and a half. Does such a raw artist go well with a polished museum?

Also in the six installations that Feigl made for this exhibition – five are brand new, one was on display in the museum for a short time in 2020 – it squeaks, creaks, twists and dances. The well-known wow feeling is most strongly felt in Tide, an installation of sixteen roller conveyors standing upright in a basin of water. The tires roll up, taking water from the basin with them in their movement. Some fall down in waves over the tires, others go up several meters. Water flowing vertically upwards: how does it exist?

Yet Tide not a spectacle work of art, it is too minimalistic and meditative for that. That applies even more to swarming, another highlight. In the center of the room is a white revolving screen that looks like a UFO hovering just below the ceiling. Metal balls roll back and forth on that screen with a lot of noise. The spectacle that unfolds is as simple as it is enchanting. The balls move like a flock of starlings: individual particles that together form one organism. Sometimes they drift further apart, then again they clump together. You can’t take your eyes off it, just like you can never get enough of a crackling campfire.

Precisely because these installations are so stunning, it is also noticeable what works less well. so missing The foundation, a room whose parquet floor undulates like a waterbed, the abstraction of the above installations. Due to the homely setting with a surrealistic element, you automatically think of all kinds of Alice in Wonderland scenarios. They get in the way of the experience of the work of art.

It may be part of it, a few minor mistakes, when you are ushering in a new phase in your artistic development. Because that’s what this exhibition shows: Zoro Feigl has come of age. The wild hairs are gone and have given way to peace and concentration. More than in previous exhibitions, you can see the essence of his art here, namely a fascination for natural forces. You experience the poetry that resides in abstract concepts such as rising and falling, clumping and atomising. There is no need for a story or deeper meaning; attention and a good dose of curiosity are enough.