Tent

Charly van Rest

22 Apr - 10 Jul 2016

The Back Room_Charly van Rest - 22.04 - 10.07.2016 (foto Sander van Wettum)
The Back Room_Charly van Rest - 22.04 - 10.07.2016 (foto Sander van Wettum)
The Back Room_Charly van Rest - 22.04 - 10.07.2016 (foto Sander van Wettum)
CHARLY VAN REST
The Back Room – Charly van Rest
22 April - 10 July 2016

On Friday 22th at 20.00 hrs, TENT presents the opening of The Back Room – Charly van Rest. It is the second part of a special collaboration between TENT and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, in which underexposed yet iconic Rotterdam artists feature in four solo exhibitions. Curated by Noor Mertens, curator of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.

The oeuvre van Charly van Rest (1949) comprises assemblages, photographs, collages, sculptures, and installations and is underscored by experimentation with techniques from which he develops witty and visually appealing imagery. In the early seventies, he developed inventive photography techniques, such as ‘ionfot’, where the electric charge of soot and dust is neutralised to create an image, and ‘Uvot’, which uses UV light to bleach posters. By using photography in unconventional ways and applying existing images as material for his work, Charly van Rest blurs the boundaries between image and object. By questioning the status of the image in his practice, Van Rest preceded strategies made common in many artistic practices through the advent of digital media. Van Rest is a forerunner in this discourse despite working exclusively with analogue techniques. The Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen collected his work for a number of years.

The Back Room examines the position occupied by both institutions – one as an established museum, the other as a young exhibition space without a collection – at local and national level. Through this collaboration, TENT and the Boijmans Van Beuningen reveal the subjective process of inclusion in, or exclusion from, the art canon. The artists presented in The Back Room are partly collected by the museum. However, their work has not always received the attention it deserves. Their oeuvres are currently important for different reasons. They are artists whose use of materials and whose strategies resonate with the work of today’s younger generation of artists. The Back Room, therefore, raises questions about the role and position of the artist: how does the artist build a reputation and what factors influence their success? At TENT, The Back Room runs concurrently with Project Rotterdam at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, which focuses on a young generation of artists not yet known as institutional figures.