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Conspiracy II
Four chairs riveted together, conspired with their shadows thrown menacingly forward.
Also take a look at Conspiracy IV, the pencil drawing Circle and Brotherhood.
Machaon
Book with graphics by 7 artists who all made work with the poetry collection ‘Until death at sea’ by Peter Swanborn as a starting point.
In addition to me, the following artists participated and so graphics can be found in this book: Iris van Dongen, Henk Tichelaar, Linda Zwart, José op ten Berg, Francine Steegs and my wife Sofia Ramselaar.
Meal of friends
After primarily using my own trusted chair, ‘strangers’ gradually emerged. In the beginning, directly linked to a chair made or depicted by another artist, such as by Van Gogh, Duchamps and Magritte, especially because I had used them in earlier works. To invite all these ‘friends’ to a joint meal, that seemed like something.
Musical chairs
A circle of chairs remains intriguing to me. Expectation, rhythm, symmetry, time, family, conversation or meeting, just a few concepts that arise in this context. And musical chairs of course, a round dance with one seat less than dancers. As usual, I don’t need the dancers.
Also take a look at ‘Collier‘, which is an anamorfosis of this work. There are also numerous circular shapes on this site, such as Cycle from 1997, Tijdkring IV from 2008 or Tijdkring VII from 2016.
Seats for black holes
Using chairs as letters to convey a message was a great find for me. Especially if you can then put the title of the work in a different light. For example, ‘Z onder Titel (‘Z’ under title in English) is certainly a playful commentary on the many works of the same name in countless museums (‘untitled’ in English). And Seats for Black Holes is such an offering for phenomena in the universe. The chairs annex letters are the celestial bodies that fill the firmament and offer a seat to a black hole (The words/chairs in the image are in dutch: Zetels voor zwarte gaten).
Z onder titel
What you see is what you get or Z (onder=) under (titel=) title. From about 1996 upto 2000 I made a series of works where I used the chair as a letter. Such as Alphabet, Furniture Show and most impressive Seats for black holes.
Escher in Oirschot
Made in the first of my two graduation years at the Academy for Visual Education in Tilburg. In the kitchen of (my wife) Sofia’s student house there was such an Oirschot chair. Playing with that chair’s shape, this variant emerged, a trifle with major consequences. I didn’t know at the time that it was called that, but one of the teachers at the academy dropped that name. The combination between in this case a drawing and a title that offers a clue arose then. My sense of language and associative ability join the maker and loose is the bear.
Recently I made Escher in Oirschot II. Very different and yet also very related.