Ab van Hanegem - Study for Position #4
Ab van Hanegem - Study for Position #4
February 21 – April 4, 2015
Location 1: Galerie Gilla Lörcher | Temporary, Linienstr. 141, 10115 Berlin
Location 2: Galerie Gilla Lörcher | Contemporary Art, Pohlstr. 73, 10785 Berlin
One should have a steady head to dive into the painterly power spaces of Ab van Hanegem.
Oversized brushstrokes stretch across canvases, tubes of paint seem to explode, and organic black-and-white forms evoke copied templates of architectural elements. Suddenly, amidst the interplay of colors, lines, and bands, a specific color field disrupts the scene, enhancing the three-dimensional effect of the overall impression. As a viewer, you quickly feel more immersed in the paintings than merely in front of them, surrendering to the whirlpool of various perspectives.
Overlapping color bands repeatedly lead into apparent dead ends, yet the artist skillfully opens a loophole into the next dimension with his virtuoso painting. The journey continues rapidly into a world of possibilities and illusions that appears quite real for a moment.
In the midst of it all, the question of the individual's location emerges. Surprisingly, the precisely placed color field offers a sense of grounding. In his recent paintings, Ab van Hanegem creates a Virtual Space that pushes the illusion of space and architecture in painting to its limits.
The intricate arrangements of lines open a space for thought, raising questions about what lies behind. What exists beyond our sight and perception? The subversion of vision, coupled with the contemplation and analysis of mathematical phenomena in topology, forms the theoretical backdrop of Ab van Hanegem's art. Enriched with a subtle rhetoric of artistic contrasts—organic and technical, graphic and gestural, or expressive and photoreal—he succeeds in creating utopian color spaces that balance distance and closeness, familiarity and the unfamiliar.
In a series of black-and-white paintings, the artist further challenges our perception. Through the sole gradations of white and black, the expressive-gestural images appear either as a photorealistic representation of an image or simply as a black-and-white reproduction of one of his paintings.
Our visual experiences, driven by the desire to classify images and thus a realm of collective memory, are misled here, gaining an experiential visual diversity through the reduction of colors. The Virtual Space, reminiscent of the inscribed connotation of black-and-white photographs, feels more like a time travel to the past in our color-saturated world. But who knows if the future is truly colorful? Ab van Hanegem breaks through this bias once more when he transfers the illusion of painting into real architecture, revealing the dizziness in our heads as mere deception.
Text: Constanze Musterer, Art Historian, Berlin
Ab van Hanegem (born 1960 in Vlissingen, NL) studied at the Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten St. Joost (Breda, NL) and at the Rijksacademie (Amsterdam, NL). He lives and works in Amsterdam and Berlin. Ab van Hanegem received a scholarship from the Vordemberge-Gildewart Foundation and was awarded the Charlotte Köhler Prize. His works have been exhibited in numerous international institutions and galleries, including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, NL; Drawing Center New York, US; Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, NL; Centraal Museum Utrecht, NL; Museum De Beijerd, Breda, NL; Museum Wiesbaden, D; Kunsthalle Recklinghausen, D; Kunstverein Malkasten Düsseldorf, D; Kunstmuseum Heidenheim, D; Galerie Art & Project, Slootdorp, NL; Vous etes ici, Amsterdam, NL; Galerie Gilla Lörcher, Berlin, D. He has presented his works at Art Cologne and Art Brussels and is represented in many collections, such as KPN, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Centraal Museum in Utrecht, Collection Sanders in Amsterdam, and Bouwfonds Nederlandse Gemeenten.