‘Collector’s Items No.4: ‘Reconnaissance – Dutch
Collectors’ Eyes & Some of the Places They Look’

Celebrating the international scope of Dutch contemporary art collections, ‘Reconnaissance’ is a unique collaboration of Dutch collections, galleries and non-profit spaces. With a knowing nod to the London art fair season, ‘Reconnaissance’ will feature presentations of works by artists in a range of collections including Chadha Art Collection, Cobra to Contemporary - Hugo & Carla Brown, Pieter Saunders, David Versteeg, and Antoine de Weerd, amongst others.

Projects will also be presented by Boetzelaer|Nispen, Galerie Diana Stigter, Rokeby, Galerie Ron Mandos, ersatz and MU, amongst other participating galleries and non-profit spaces.

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‘Nolympics – Unrealised Dutch Olympic Architecture’’

The Dutch project for the International Showcase of the LFA 2012

A timely nod to London’s Olympic year, ‘Nolympics’ is pretty self-explanatory: unrealised Dutch Olympic architecture.

This exhibition project, the Dutch contribution to the International Showcase of the London Festival of Architecture 2012, profiles a selection of high-quality projects connected to past bids to become an Olympic, versions of Olympic designs that were never realised in their original form and, more excitingly, Olympic architecture that may still happen. In some cases, this is certainly a possibility.

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‘Living Room’

A London Fashion Week exhibition project

Curated by People Of The Labyrinths / Geert de Rooij & Hans Demoed

Included Designers & Artists:
People Of The Labyrinths/Geert de Rooij & Hans Demoed, Erwin Olaf, Anya Janssen, Rick Tegelaar, Klaas Kuiken, Hella Jongerius, Studio Job, Studio Makking & Bey, Jurgen Bey, JKN, Alexander van Slobbe, Roderick Vos

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Maaike Schoorel - ‘Zelfportretten & Stillevens’

NL-The Dutch Cultural Pop-Up Space in London is pleased to announce ‘Zelfportretten & Stillevens’, a solo project by Maaike Schoorel. Curated by Ken Pratt.

Maaike Schoorel’s work inhabits a position on the edge of legibility. Her figurative paintings appear faded or bleached with brush strokes that suggest outlines and restrained marks that imply areas of colour or shadow. The viewer must participate in the paintings, the works demand ones perception to be slowed down to allow the images to unravel slowly over time.

Schoorel uses photographs of family, friends and herself as sources of reference and inspiration for her work, as well as depicting other familiar scenes and still life that allude to the history of her chosen medium. The various painting genres that she employs help to structure her practice.

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Maartje Korstanje, Janice McNab, Desiree Palmen

NL is proud to present Pareidolia, a thematic group show of work by three artists whose extremely different practices are nonetheless connected by a phenomenon that is intentionally or coincidentally bound up in their work. 

Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon. In its most brutally scientific terms it involves a vague and random stimulus (usually an image or sound) being perceived as significant. As will become clear from works presented in the exhibition, there is nothing vague or random about how these artists have worked with arranging stimuli that rely on the viewer undergoing a complex experience of perception.

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NL is proud to present the first London solo exhibition by Jacqueline Hassink.

Jacqueline Hassink is a New York-based Dutch artist whose conceptual practice using photography has applied a highly structured approach to turning the lens on phenomena that effectively elaborate the more abstract values beneath the immediate surface of the image. More specifically, Hassink has used photography as a means by which to systematically approach the world of economic power in its infinite guises.

What at first glance might appear to come from a fine art photography documentary tradition turns out to be something else on closer inspection. Seemingly familiar rooms – such as corporate boardrooms- might act as a gateway to a reflection on the global economic forces inherently manifest within these spaces. Or there are the female ‘spokesmodels’ at car fairs of the ‘Car Girls’ series, again a recognisable image within the mass visual canon. Although Jacqueline Hassink’s interest in such phenomena is specifically how corporate branding and huge multinationals operate on a global scale locally, they naturally also prompt questions about the complex gender politics at work within societies that have supposedly assimilated the victories of Feminism into their economic and industrial structures.

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Ansuya Blom, Martin Effert, Risk Hazekamp, Renie Spoelstra, Willem Weismann, Bas Zoontjens .

‘You Are Here’ is an exhibition of Dutch contemporary visual art at the intersection –one might even say coordinates given the context- of two agendas.

On one hand the show is drawn from artists who have (previously) been nominated for the Sovereign European Art Prize, underscoring NL’s collaboration with the Sovereign Art Foundation.

However, rather than being a simple review or listing, the second agenda has been to draw on specific work from the eclectic group of nominees in order to elaborate a cohesive curatorial thematic. In this case it is one that fits aptly with the mission of NL – The Dutch Cultural Pop-Up Space in London.

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Hernan Bas, Marc Bijl, Norbert Bisky, Iris Van Dongen, Martin Eder, Aaron van Erp, Cyprien Gaillard, Anthony Goicolea, David Haines, Erik Van Lieshout, Joep van Lieshout (AVL), Alisa Margolis, Erwin Olaf, Hans Op de Beeck, Ronald Ophuis, Grayson Perry, Christian Schoeler, Maaike Schoorel, Anne Wenzel.

The second exhibition in the ‘Collector’s Items’ series at NL-The Dutch Cultural Space in London timed to coincide with the annual London art fair season turns its attention to an important private collection.

‘High Drama’ is an exhibition drawn from the collection of Hugo & Carla Brown that picks up the themes of melodrama, theatricality, the Gothic and self-conscious staginess in the work of some of the most exciting contemporary artists within this significant collection.

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Coinciding with London Fashion Week, Rui Leonardes will present ‘Asylum’ at NL – The Dutch Cultural Pop-Up Space in London.

Taking the form of an installation rather than a traditional showroom or catwalk show, ‘Aylum’ will see Leonardes presenting his conceptual approach to fashion as a unified exhibition, albeit one that will include pieces from his latest collections.

Drawing on diverse cinematic influences such as Tarkovsky’s ‘Stalker’ (1979) and Wim Wenders’ cult 1987 film ‘Wings of Desire‘ (Der Himmel über Berlin), ‘Asylum’ will see Rui Leonardes transforming the space into something at the intersection of installation art and fashion.

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NL- The Dutch Cultural Space in London is proud to present ‘Heyboer Revisited’ a solo exhibition by the Dutch artist Jasmina Fekovic. The presentation in London will see Fekovic reworking her solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (MuHKA) as a special presentation to fit the London space. ‘Heyboer Revisted’ was presented at the MuHKA in Antwerp in 2008, curated by Grant Watson, then the curator at the MuHKA who has recently been appointed as Senior Curator & Research Associate at Iniva in London.

In her project developed for the MuHKA’s ‘Lonely At The Top’ series, Fekovic incorporated the work of the enigmatic and beloved Dutch artist Anton Heyboer (1924- 2005) – who she had come to know during the making of a previous film work- into her exhibition.

The exhibition will remain opening to the London public during the summer, from 12 until 6pm, Mondays to Saturdays.

On Thursday 9 September, the space will host a finissage reception from 6 until 9 pm prior to the exhibition’s last weekend of opening.

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NL- The Dutch Cultural Pop-Up Space in London will exhibit a special project by dRMM as the central project in the Dutch contribution to The International Showcase during the London Festival of Architecture 2010.

An innovative exhibition and a series of events focusing on dRMM’s ‘de Ark’ project will take place in the NL space in Riding House Street, W1 during the festival and continuing into the summer. It will be complemented by a series of events, presentations and discussions that locate the project within the broader context of contemporary architecture and the relationships between architecture and water, a familiar thematic in Dutch architectural practice for numerous reasons, some obvious and some less so.

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Pop music in the Netherlands runs the full spectrum, from MOR and straightforward commercial pop music through to distinctly Dutch dance music styles or unique underground scenes. Furthermore, in the Netherlands, the culture around pop music is distinctive and strong.

The oft-cited idea that the Dutch national identity places high value on design, art and conceptual thinking could easily be supported by looking not only at Dutch pop music, but looking at the culture around it. Everything from fanzines and the product design with which music is packaged to websites and memorabilia shows that – at all levels of music production- there is a lot of thought and energy put into the culture that music creates or drives.

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The main focus of the international mission of Dutch Fashion Foundation is to support Dutch designers in the embedment of their labels in the international market. It will provide a contact point for media and buyers wishing to work with the highest level of Dutch fashion design.

Angelique Westerhof, director of the Dutch Fashion Foundation:

‘The United Kingdom is an important market for the Dutch designers. This is a great opportunity to explore the market and to build a network with press, agents, buyers and manufacturers. Therefore we encourage the mission of the Dutch Embassy in the United Kingdom to support the Dutch Fashion Designers.’

Featured designers:
Bas Kosters, Conny Groenewegen, EnD by Eva and Delia, Iris van Herpen, Non by Kim

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“Chips With Everything” is an exhibition of works by three innovative Dutch collectives/studios working across the disciplines of digital design, animation, multimedia direction, art direction and art. The exhibition, curated by intendant Ken Pratt, will be held from 16 January to 13 February 2010 at the Dutch Cultural Pop Up Space in Fitzrovia, London.

Baked Beans, Circus and Minivegas are three contemporary Dutch studios based in Amsterdam. Their work is seen internationally within the commercial sphere, for example on television or as part of brand campaigns, not only in the Netherlands but worldwide where they have won commissions. But, as can be seen from some of the works on show, they occasionally cross the floor, veering into the realms of media art and visual art, something that perhaps has a longer tradition within the Netherlands than in the UK.

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AAN-UIT (literally ON-OFF) is a small specialist lighting design company based in Utrecht. It is a young company that produces designs by emerging designers in the best traditions of Dutch furniture and industrial design. Headed up by Marc Th. van der Voorn, who has designed most of the lights currently in production, AAN-UIT also produces designs by Castor Bours and Viktor Harmens.

One encounters a certain pared down simplicity and directness in the designs of AAN-UIT, a sensibility of no-fuss clean lines that we readily associate with Dutch design approaches, particularly after Modernism. But, the designs of AAN-UIT are most certainly not limited to a doctrine of undecorated form and function: we also find a certain elegance that harks back to the birth of particular traditions in the decorative arts in the Netherlands, that place in which domesticity and the very notion of the modern household were formed in the sixteenth century. And, of course, here and there we encounter that quirky visual humour that is also strongly associated with Dutch design in more recent decades; a marker that design can be aesthetically pleasing without being overly serious or inhuman.

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