Marijke van Warmerdam
16 Jan - 07 Mar 2009
MARIJKE VAN WARMERDAM
"The Flower Show"
Marijke van Warmerdam is internationally renowned for her short films. In the arly nineties she made her first non-narrative film loops, which led Daniel Birnbaum to call her the Loop Guru of the eternally flowing present. Together with her photographs and sculptures these form a consistent body of work. With a typically light touch, the work combines a deceptively naïve approach to the act of seeing with straightforward strategies such as dramatic shifts of scale and rhythm, doubling and reflection to urge us to look with our eyes wide open in order to tress that not everything is what it seems. Nowadays she has developed this etinal openness to themes which deal more explicitly with perception.
Marijke van Warmerdam’s exhibition ‘The Flower Show’ includes a film loop called ‘Trembling’, 2008, which is surrounded by a number of painted film stills. Trembling’ shows nothing but a trembling bunch of white petunias, with a road urface rushing by in the background. The film stills are printed on linen and have hite flowers painted on them by the artist in a vigorous and rapid manner. By eans of fast Tai-Chi-like movements she has obtained a striking separation etween foreground and background. Her apt painterly gesture brings about a oubling that occurs in all sorts of ways in her work. What is special is that in both the ‘Trembling’ film loop and in the paintings, called ‘Flower’ and ‘Flowers’, white flowers hover in the foreground, while a quieter background image produces a ounter-movement. A disturbance of the rhythm or the movement effects a splendid contrast of ‘here’ and ‘there’ in the work.
Van Warmerdam uses the themes of repetition and movement above all as a eans of evoking a feeling of lightness and an uninhibited future. These are always n the service of an infectious optimism. At the same time her feel-good art roaches the difference between pure ‘looking’ and the more cerebral ‘seeing’, nviting the viewer to think about what and how he perceives.
Born in Holland in 1959, she has lived and worked in New York and Berlin, and is ow based in Amsterdam. Her work has featured in numerous important nternational exhibitions, including the Sydney, Berlin, Kwangju and Venice iennials, and Documenta X. She has had retrospective exhibitions at the Van bbemuseum in Eindhoven, Migros Museum in Zurich, ICA in Boston, Muhka in ntwerp, MAC in Marseille, The Fruitmarket in Edinburgh and IKON in Birmingham.
"The Flower Show"
Marijke van Warmerdam is internationally renowned for her short films. In the arly nineties she made her first non-narrative film loops, which led Daniel Birnbaum to call her the Loop Guru of the eternally flowing present. Together with her photographs and sculptures these form a consistent body of work. With a typically light touch, the work combines a deceptively naïve approach to the act of seeing with straightforward strategies such as dramatic shifts of scale and rhythm, doubling and reflection to urge us to look with our eyes wide open in order to tress that not everything is what it seems. Nowadays she has developed this etinal openness to themes which deal more explicitly with perception.
Marijke van Warmerdam’s exhibition ‘The Flower Show’ includes a film loop called ‘Trembling’, 2008, which is surrounded by a number of painted film stills. Trembling’ shows nothing but a trembling bunch of white petunias, with a road urface rushing by in the background. The film stills are printed on linen and have hite flowers painted on them by the artist in a vigorous and rapid manner. By eans of fast Tai-Chi-like movements she has obtained a striking separation etween foreground and background. Her apt painterly gesture brings about a oubling that occurs in all sorts of ways in her work. What is special is that in both the ‘Trembling’ film loop and in the paintings, called ‘Flower’ and ‘Flowers’, white flowers hover in the foreground, while a quieter background image produces a ounter-movement. A disturbance of the rhythm or the movement effects a splendid contrast of ‘here’ and ‘there’ in the work.
Van Warmerdam uses the themes of repetition and movement above all as a eans of evoking a feeling of lightness and an uninhibited future. These are always n the service of an infectious optimism. At the same time her feel-good art roaches the difference between pure ‘looking’ and the more cerebral ‘seeing’, nviting the viewer to think about what and how he perceives.
Born in Holland in 1959, she has lived and worked in New York and Berlin, and is ow based in Amsterdam. Her work has featured in numerous important nternational exhibitions, including the Sydney, Berlin, Kwangju and Venice iennials, and Documenta X. She has had retrospective exhibitions at the Van bbemuseum in Eindhoven, Migros Museum in Zurich, ICA in Boston, Muhka in ntwerp, MAC in Marseille, The Fruitmarket in Edinburgh and IKON in Birmingham.