Erik Odijk

My first introduction with his work was at the Fonds BKVB ; a huge drawing after you enter the building. My second time was at Franckendael, and Erik Odijk was there in person. There is always a great value in seeing and talking with the person behind the work and most of all about the work. And I love his work, this mysterious and impressive piece of art hanging on the wall as if it were original wallpaper from the Baroque and Symbolist period.

Erik Odijk makes drawings in his studio and at exhibitions where he draws on the wall. Nature is the protagonist in his oeuvre. The artist works through untamed landscapes and recapitulates the experience of place in his work. His drawn landscapes have a rugged charm. The multilayered graphic style makes tangible the tendrils of time and their slow entwining of nature. The style is a traditional one; in formal respects, it recalls the hallucinating quality of line in the landscapes of Jan Toorop in his Symbolist period. Erik Odijk depicts the vitality and the darkness of nature. His work is suffused with the idea that the real experience of nature is a euphoric one which is denied to us by our civilized lifestyle. This is why photography is gaining a more prominent role in his present work. Erik Odijk has recently been compiling photographic series relating to his landscape walks. These add an objective angle on the place experience: the photographs are a counterpoint to the drawings, and so expand his study of the experience of nature in the 21st century.

Pär Strömberg – Into the Starless Night

Swedish artist Pär Strömberg presents his new series of paintings in the solo exhibition
Into the Starless Night in Galerie 37 Haarlem, The Netherlands

The paintings of Pär Strömberg show silent landscapes. The works refer to the dense Swedish nature, beautiful but deserted. Just like in nature, the light and darkness are important elements in the paintings. Strömberg paints snow, ice, forests and mountains in his –as he calls them – mindscapes, rich in their deep hues of black, white and grey.
The recent series Into the Starless Night refers to the Three Wise Men in the Bible, guided by the star of Bethlehem. Here Strömberg flirts with the Scandinavian national Romanticism and post-apocalyptic alienation. Inspiration he finds in literature, (Jules Verne, The Mysterious Island en Per Olov Enquist, Captain Nemo’s Library) film and music, and for example in the work of the Norwegian artist Theodor Kittelsen.
Symbolic imagery plays an important part in his work. Crows as an omen of death, floating between past, future and present. The moon as a guiding light in darkness. He refers to myths and paints them in a contemporary and specific style. These new works go beyond the ambiguous play of darkness and light. Strömberg carves his own path into the starless night, where viewers may enter at their own risk.

Strömberg (Örebro, 1972) lives and works in Amsterdam and Stockholm. In 1999 he finished the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. He has had numerous solo and group shows in Sweden, The Netherlands and abroad. In 2002 he won the Wim Izak price and was nominated four times for the Koninklijke Schildersprijs. His work is represented in several art collections. At this moment he also teaches at the Örebro College of Art in Sweden.

Two years ago we both a painting at the Art fair in Amsterdam and we are still happy with this small treasure.

Pär Strömberg – Into the Starless Night
30 January – 6 March 2011
Opening: Sunday, 30 th of January 15:30 p.m. by Mr. Hugo Brown

Galerie 37
Jedithja de Groot
Groot Heiligland 37 | 2011 EP | Haarlem | 00-31-(0)6-10142540 |
info@galerie37.nl ( released at the  20th of  January 2011) www.galerie37.nl (new website at the 20th of January 2011) | open: Thursday – Sunday 12 till 17 p.m.

David LaChapelle

LaChapelle Heaven to Hell is the third volume in an exhilarating trilogy that began with LaChapelle Land (1996) and continued with the infamous Hotel LaChapelle (1999). Packed with astonishing, color-saturated, and provocative images, those titles both became instant collector’s items and have since gone through multiple printings. Featuring almost twice as many images as its predecessors, LaChapelle Heaven to Hell is an explosive compilation of new work by the visionary photographer. Since the publication of Hotel LaChapelle, the strength of LaChapelle’s work lies in its ability to focus the lens of celebrity and fashion toward more pressing issues of societal concern.

LaChapelle’s images—of the most famous faces on the planet, and marginalized figures like transsexual Amanda Lepore or the cast of his critically acclaimed social documentary Rize—call into question our relationship with gender, glamour, and status. Using his trademark baroque excess, LaChapelle inverts the consumption he appears to celebrate, pointing instead to apocalyptic consequences for humanity itself. While referencing and acknowledging diverse sources such as the Renaissance, art history, cinema, The Bible, pornography, and the new globalized pop culture, LaChapelle has fashioned a deeply personal and epoch-defining visual language that holds up a mirror to our times.

This popular hardcover edition of LaChapelle Heaven to Hell is a must-have for anyone interested in contemporary photography. It is also keenly priced, especially for those who have coveted TASCHEN’s limited edition, LaChapelle, Artists & Prostitutes.

The artist:
David LaChapelle was offered his first professional job by Andy Warhol to shoot for Interview magazine. Since then his work has been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide, including Tony Shafrazi Gallery and Deitch Projects in New York, and London’s Barbican. His images have appeared in countless magazines including Vogue Italia, French Vogue, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone and i-D. In recent years he has expanded into music videos, live theatrical events and documentary film-making.

I’ve just got this from my friend, a late bithday present! Thank you Jan Bart.

Robert Mapplethorpe

Mapplethorpe was born and grew up as a Roman Catholic of English and Irish heritage in Our Lady of the Snows Parish in Floral Park, Queens, New York. He studied for a B.F.A. from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he majored in graphic arts, though he dropped out in 1969 before finishing his degree. Mapplethorpe lived with his partner Patti Smith from 1967–1974, and she supported him by working in bookstores. They created art together, and even after he realized he was gay they maintained a close relationship.
Mapplethorpe took his first photographs soon thereafter using a Polaroid camera. In the mid-1970s, he acquired a Hasselblad medium-format camera and began taking photographs of a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, including artists, composers, and socialites. In the 1980s he refined his aesthetic, photographing statuesque male and female nudes, delicate flower still life, and highly formal portraits of artists and celebrities. Mapplethorpe’s first studio was at 24 Bond Street in Manhattan. In the 1980s, his mentor and lifetime companion, art curator Sam Wagstaff gave him $500,000 to buy the top-floor loft at 35 West 23rd Street, where he lived and had his shooting space. He kept the Bond Street loft as his darkroom.
Mapplethorpe died on the morning of March 9, 1989, 42 years old, from complications arising from AIDS.

Many Dutch and international photographers are inspired by Mapplethrope’s vision. My dream is to obtain one of these photos for your art collection.

My favorite christmas ornament

Christmas is coming and the hole shit is out of the cellar. The moment is there: ‘my favorite ornament, the Barack Obama christmas ornament’. Not very interesting for outsiders but for me a orgasm!

Pierre Molinier

A present of Rene Ketting, thank you Rene!

The method and genesis of Pierre Molinier’s oeuvre with more than 800 pictures, mostly unpublished, numerous documents, manuscripts and letters, a complete chronology, a critical biography, and a text by Jean-Luc Mercié.
Pierre Molinier is an unknown of worldwide renown. Every book and every exhibition on the body, gender confusion or sexual excess seems to feature at least one work by this artist whose “genius” was acclaimed by André Breton in a memorable text published in 1956.
But the bulk of his work has remained inaccessible. A number of pictures have never been shown and a corpus of only 160 prints has been published. The ensemble revealed by the artist’s archives is much more extensive. It includes numerous proofs made to prepare his photomontages and working prints given to friends, but also notebooks and personal letters. Here, precise links emerge between his paintings, photographs and scandalous life. The myth carefully constructed by the artist begins to crumble before the reality of the work.
An inveterate seducer, thoroughgoing fetishist, unrepentant transvestite and inadvertent bisexual, to the very last Molinier reveal the method, shed light on the procedures and give details of the origin and alchemy of his latent or composed images. Finally, an exhaustive chronology offers a new biography of Molinier, based on his letters: for it is in the intimacy of these writings that the shaman’s heart beats closest to the truth.

Riette Wanders

My god what a marvelous work! These are old drawings from 2009 but she has new work at her blog: http://www.riettewanders.blogspot.com. Take a look and you can always make an appointment with her personaly to visit her atelier.

Evelien van Pruissen

winner of the AVRO selfmade fashion contest 2010
http://cultuurgids.avro.nl/front/detailkunst.html?item=f2f58da9b113237aa87c1ee9debe0900

Louis Vuitton: 100 legendary trunks

This exceptional book, with a preface by Patrick-Louis Vuitton, showcases 100 of Louis Vuitton’s most exceptional creations from 150 years of craftsmanship and savoir-faire. Enriched with 800 archive photographs and illustrations, it is presented in a special edition, exclusive to Louis Vuitton stores, with a deluxe Monogram canvas-print slipcase covered with hotel labels.

Nice to own it en looks good on your coffee table!

Fresh Hell / Palais de Tokyo

By mapping the artist’s brain, desires, and influences, the carte blanche gives a fresh slant on the creative process and aesthetic correlations. In the wake of Ugo Rondinone in 2008 and Jeremy Deller in 2009, Adam McEwen (British artist living in New York) hatches an extraordinary scheme and creates a dialogue between medieval sculpture and conceptual art, vaults and attempts to levitate, forgotten artists and those already blessed by history. When faced with this history, what stance can an artist take today? Everything has been done already? Great, now we can finally get to work! The exhibition FRESH HELL dives into history, recent or distant, but doesn’t bore through the strata. Instead, it skims horizontally and nonlinearly, generating multiple paradoxes and stirring up a breath of fresh air that is constantly sucked away by ghostly shadows.

My favourite was this instalation, maybe my interest in denim at the moment!