Lisanne Hoogerwerf
With Pim Palsgraaf, Maurice van Tellingen, Hugo Tieleman & Casper Verborg
Opening Ascension Day, May 18, from 3:00 – 5:00 p.m.
Lisanne Hoogerwerf uses photography to make her imagination and memories visible. In her studio, she builds places and landscapes that are colorful and playful, but also grim. Hoogerwerf photographs, as she herself calls it, “real unreal places. By this she means that the locations she captures are not rooted in reality, but are made of real materials. Lisanne Hoogerwerf is permanently represented by Galerie Wilms.
This exhibition will feature new work by Lisanne Hoogerwerf along with artworks by Pim Palsgraaf, Maurice van Tellingen, Hugo Tieleman and Casper Verborg. Four artists that Hoogerwerf nominated because she sees thematic common ground between her own work and that of these artists.
The photographs of Lisanne Hoogerwerf (b. 1987) show places that seem both fictional and real; they are landscapes that stand outside everyday reality, but are made with tangible materials such as wood, sand, paint and cardboard.
For Hoogerwerf, photography is a means of making inner images visible. Her imagination and memories are the inspiration for her work. The floor of her studio is the stage on which she makes her small-scale landscapes appear and disappear; once a landscape is finished, she carefully captures it with her camera, only to tear it down again so that new works can emerge.
“Something intangible, what I see before me in my own imagination, I make tangible with physical materials,” she says. In the process of filming and photographing, it then takes on a reality of its own. As soon as I have made the image, that world also disappears again, back into the intangible. It’s a constant interaction between something really present and its slipping and disappearing again.”
Lisanne Hoogerwerf lives and works in The Hague. She studied at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and then studied Film and Literature at Leiden University. After her studies, she worked for several years as a photographer and videographer. In 2019, she began expressing her inner images. Her current work arises in a combination of small-scale building, painting and photography.
Pim Palsgraaf (b. 1979) is inspired by decay and irregularities in the city. The opposition between nature and urbanity is relevant in his work, which includes an increasingly in-depth investigation of the erosion of the inner city. Empty spaces, old corridors and ceilings on the verge of collapse where nature takes over: they all feed his fascination with this process.
Palsgraaf regularly roams and works with other artists in the ruins of large industrial structures, as found in former East Germany, for example. In 2012, he initiated the project If Paradise Is Half As Nice (IPIHAN), an art project aimed at making art in these abandoned buildings. For a period of about a month, IPIHAN takes over a building, sets up living and working spaces and makes art with what the building has to offer.
In his paintings, Hugo Tieleman (b. 1982) primarily seeks the contrast between nature and human influence. “The tragedy of the landscape, that’s what my work is about,” he tells himself. Reviewer Micha Andriessen writes: “His colorful paintings depict displaced and overgrown scenes of decay. With sometimes toxic colors, Tieleman shows how mankind leaves its traces in nature. With references to traditional painting, vanitas and the landscapes and ruins of Romanticism, Hugo Tieleman examines our altered perception of nature, the landscape and the world around us.”
In his objects Maurice van Tellingen (1957) searches for the insignificant, the everyday. For example, he depicts a simple window of a child’s room or a single blue curtain through which a window is visible. Another time you find a snow-white door placed in a square frame. From afar, these domestic scenes seem photographed or painted, but up close you see that they are three-dimensional models: objects that he executes with great precision and attention in different materials.
In terms of subject matter, he seems to be systematically searching for the imaginary within the everyday; illusion and reality are an extension of each other for him. When you view his hushed spaces, you wonder what staging you have entered: ‘What has happened here or what exactly is going to happen?’ Van Tellingen studied at the Rietveld Academy and the Rijksacademie, both in Amsterdam. He was part of important museum exhibitions and also participated in a large number of exhibitions abroad.
Left open or sanded pieces of canvas, pasty masses interspersed with thin strokes of paint and subtle details: the paintings of Casper Verborg (1981) are alive. He has developed an idiosyncratic palette with characteristic colors in unexpected combinations. At first glance cheerful, but on second thought more alarming, even poisonous, like that irresistible candy that is actually of chemical substance.
Hidden’s handling of color and the layered paint surfaces of his paintings are as whimsical as the scenes they reflect. He depicts the world as the theater of inner turmoil without explicitly zooming in on what actually happened. His characters refer to human drama or just mundane matters. There are references to romantic painters as well as to more contemporary abstraction. The environment has taken on a greater role in his work in recent years – more emphatically present, but more abstract and therefore more universal. In a painting, the background can be read as indoor or outdoor space, as forest, architecture or oil slick. It is as if the touches, stains and smudges briefly come together only to fall apart again an instant later, just as you turn around.