GALERIE
FRANZIS
ENGELS
We have a great collection in the gallery from the artist with whom we work together
Marian Bijlenga works with thread, fabric and horsehair, fishscales and parchment, materials which are soft, light, flexible and open to endless development.
For her transparency is a prerequisite. By leaving some space between the structure and the wall the object is freed from its background and interacts with the white wall. It becomes what she calls a “Spatial Drawing”.
Rene van den Bos makes paperworks with watercolors and paintings with acryl. But with both techniques he aims to optical distract the observer. His blocks and lines are vibrating like they are dancing across the surface.
Helene Briels glues little pieces of paper, which she first painted. She uses different colors for the inside and the outside and the blades. This gives her work an endless moving and a never ending play of colors. Every point of view gives another experience.
Karin Dekker constructs sculptures with numerous curved pieces of steel.
Due to the open structure, the sculptures are translucent, the inside of the work is as visible and important as the outside.
In the shiny surface the colors of surrounding objects are caught. Karin often combines mathematical and organic shapes.
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Apparently quiet the metal sculptures - mostly fixated on just one point - are floating in space. Their image is made by solely horizontal and vertical lines that seems to follow their own perspective. This impression is very volatile because every move in the surroundings - whether a breeze of air or people walking around - the sculpture takes another appearance.
Bert Frijns Creates light, transparent works, often elegantly and gently leaning – almost bowing – to the viewer. The transparency of glass enables light to penetrate his works, which plays with reflections in the glass and appears compelling and meditative. He often combines the slightly green sculptural works in glass with water, which captures and enhances the interplay of light and movement.
Optical vibrant and distracting works. The way he strains his subtile wires gives an illusion of a tree dimensional scape. Intruiging. One has to keep observing to discover how the shapes are coming out of the flat surface.
Besides his small works which work wel in a living-room, Robbert de Goede loves to make space-filling installations in old buildings.
Willem Harber’s sculptures resemble machines, but not machines that expedite life, they delay it. Stationary equipment.
It takes some time before you can produce slow moving images in as quick a pace as these. By suggesting they are being charged, as spectator you get the notion that energy is flowing.
Ulrich Haug works with wax and concrete. The contrast can't be bigger. But there is more to it. Not only more materials, often hidden in the wax and the concrete. More in the sense of a story that is told about visibility and dreams. A story about he state of nature connected maybe to a state of mind.
In her oil paintings Wil Jansen uses motives from nature to start an investigation to the fundamental aspect from the art of painting. Looking for colour and form, the properties of the material, searching for patterns, rhythm and regularity, structures and the very special skin of paint.
IB Jorn is inspired by the statement:
“Do You Know How To Use This Weapon?”
Ib Jorn uses his art as a weapon. Usually a weapon is used to repel the enemy. What enemy Ib Jorn is chasing is unclear but seems likely that it is a personal demon!
For Marja Kennis the identity of a place is defined by its habitat. The presence of local lifeforms, especially plants, is not only the consequence of natural environment, but also of human attendance. Human decide which plants may appear, ruled by cultural regulations about a.o. economic and estetical qualities. All life is temporary, transforms into other life forms and in the end is lost. In malls she casts life and races of life, combines several imprints in clay or porcelain and enriches them with a new identity.
Aurelien Mailard’s sculptures in the series “Impact” are ambiguous.
The viewer sees a smooth surface that appears to have been attacked with a sharp instrument. The surface shows scratches, dents and cuts; all signs of a spontaneous violent outburst.
We are left to speculate as to what provoked such a furious act.
But then, the viewer notices that this impression is not correct: there is no evidence of frayed edges, the shards are smooth and don’t show splinters. The form is seductive. The image shows a lot of attention to detail and is skilfully constructed.
Deirdre McLoughlin shapes sublime forms with a fine finish. She has won first prizes in 2014 and 2004 in the four yearly Ceramics of Europe Westerwald Prize and was honored in the 4th World Ceramic Biennale in Korea in 2007. One from her ‘I am too’ series is printed on an Irish stamp to celebrate this ‘grand lady of ceramic art’.
She is a sculptor whose work intrigues in the tranquil visual language with which she shapes the void.
From the beginning of the sixties, Frans Mossou makes concrete art such as light prints and light objects.
The foundation are space, time, light and mass.
His work is related to the neoplastici and the development of art in the sixtie like minimal art en the zero movement.
His work is in several private and museum collections.
He found 42 dead bumblebees underneath a three in front of his studio. Sincde then he tries to make us aware of the consequence ofour human actions on nature. And in the end on ourselves as part of nature. He is not scared to be very direct in his visual language, but more often he uses humor for his message. The result are intriguing sculptures in which buttefllies, sometimes equipped with weapons to defend themselves, dreamingly file around. Bumblebees and bees can be brought back to live in cases of emergency to start pollinating again. Art with a wink, but every piece constructed with the outmost care.
He grew up in West-Friesland. The polders capes always stayed his source for his work. Also the buildings, bakens in the landscape, are found back in his sculptures. The robust forms of the sculptures are similar with the sturdy character of the buildings. This sturdyness as a contrast to the glitziness of the surroundings in which they are found.
Stefan Rohrer (1968) was already fascinated by the shapes and colors of cars when he was a young boy. Being an artist he uses cars not only for their aesthetics and functionality, but he plays with the meaning they represent in out modern society: speed, prestige, power.
With glass, ceramics, porcelain, silicons, water, licht, noise, Janine Schimkat builds her own fantasieworld; Utopkein which beauty dominates. Often she uses Latin names of organisms to give a suggestion of scientific argument to her self created universe.
The natural apparition of symbioses, “the harmonization of two organisms, often totally merged together and having a mutual profit", is one of her main reasons to use several materials in one object.
This combination of materials often works illusionistic; is it glass? or silicons? Is is tough and breakable - or flexible and tough?
Her work strongly relates to architecture. studied Monumental Design at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy where art and architecture in the urban landscape was the theme of the course.
Sengers’murals and wall sculptures engage in dialogue with the immediate architecture.
Besides his salt-project, which is ongoing since 1979 with different results, he is a painter were light is also, how can it be else, the challenge. Colourfull and bright which appeals to the imagination of how things can fit together, or using marble powders and pigments which gives the sensation of a travel deep in the hidden caves of the earth. A painter with a wide pallet of possibilities.
She finished AKI ArtEZ Enschede, Autonome Kunsten 4D/Media Kunst in 2010. But what she loves most is drawing. She starts to blacken a sheet of paper with charcoal and then gums the white back in. With this procedure she is able to make very tiny, moving lines solidly in space. Her work invites you to look twice, it pulls you into the depth.
Glass bubbles are taking the central position in the objects from Marinke van Zandwijk. Blowing glass by herself is gives her the opportunity to give her bubbles an unique soul. With these they all get their own character, their own face. She make different groups of family's who can make their own story's. She gives them attributes like though metal or rough ropes. The interaction between the fragile and transparent glass and the robust steel and rope put emphasis on the vulnerability of the glass.
Galerie Franzis Engels Nieuwevaart 200, 1018ZN Amsterdam, +31 6 31000323, Open: Thu - Sat 13.00 - 18.00 info@Franzisengels.nl
Contemporary art in the centre of Amsterdam.