Disturbed Nature: Drei Kunstler am Rande des Naturlichen: Jurriaan Benschop
deutsch text/ nederlands text
How do humans interact with the leftover nature that surrounds them? Photographer Anja de Jong (NL, works in Dordrecht) went travelling with this question. She visited places in the world where the line between original nature and the landscape shaped by humans could still sharply be seen. Although the untouched was photographed, you can also see it disappear, as there is still a visible element of human civilization (or disturbance): a grave, a tyre tack or an observatory, for example. In a series of clear, unsentimental black and white photos entitled Borderland viewers are led along changing areas in locations like Hawaii, La Palma, Antarctica and Namibia.
Michael Markwick (US/NL, works in Dordrecht and Berlin) spent part of his youth in a trailer park in Michigan on the outskirts of the city. It is a remarkable border area where nature and human settlements collide, where landscape and trash mix. Memories of this became the starting point for a number of landscape-focused paintings, including Darker Dualities. In Markwick’s work nature never appears in an untouched or pure form. Pure is a word that actually does not qualify his expressive paintings. Each painting contains contradictory voices and is mixed and layered. It is violent as well as sensitive, while dark as well as light in atmosphere. His unique, expressive touch can also be seen in drawings where city and land are intertwined.
The sculptures of Jeroen Jacobs (NL, works in Berlin) are created in a work process that is a middle ground between the artist’s vision and ‘letting it happen’. What is remarkable about his concrete sculptures is that they look lively and in motion, something you would not expect from concrete. Jacobs has brought this rigid material to life: the concrete forms itself organically and moves freely through space. The work was created by thoroughly observing the material world, as much the obvious properties as the hidden ones. Jacobs looks at things such as the rest shape of a piece of furniture or sees how a metal packaging strip forms a drawing in space once it is cut off. It is important how objects behave in space for him. Only by interacting with architecture is the actual work created, underlined by his unique use of displays. On one occasion it serves as a pedestal for an image, on another one, viewers can sit on it or it is used to divide up space
(Text: Jurriaan Benschop)
