Galerie Bart is delighted to present Tamara Muller, Jisan Ahn, Bas Kosters, Jeppe Lauge and Rotteveel Vermeer at Art Busan. This group presentation shows an extensive range of styles, from figurative to abstract, from inner to outer experiences, and from two to three-dimensional works. We are thrilled to present this broad view of our program and represent the distinct voices and perspectives of the artists.
Bas Kosters (1977, NL) is an artist and designer known for his colourful, socially engaged and personal work. He makes extensive use of exuberant figures, characters and texts. Bas originally graduated as a fashion designer but now moves freely through the creative field. Since 2017, Bas focuses primarily on creating autonomous work. He expresses difficult emotions through buoyancy, subtle or wry humour, and punchy words. These emotions find their way into tapestries, puppets, sets, costumes, glass objects, installations, drawings and paintings. He creates worlds inhabited by radiant, alarming and endearing figures that reflect his social engagement. Bas’ fascination for cartoon characters and visualizations leads to a world infused with friction, filled with different views that compete for your attention.
Rotteveel Vermeer is a Dutch art studio by colourists Jochem Rotteveel (1976, NL) and Thomas Vermeer (1984, NL). Their work expresses Jochem and Thomas’ shared fascination with colour. They explore how colours can influence each other and impact the viewer’s mood. The result of their efforts is a collaborative series of works created in the tradition of Jochem’s methodology. They use foil to investigate boundaries by adding volume and stretching the boundary between two-dimensional and three-dimensional.
Tamara Muller (1975, NL) uses her face in her paintings to tell a universal story. They are not self-portraits in the fundamental sense of the word. She plays a complex role: the personas she inhabits in her work shoot back and forth between combinations of people: man, woman, adult, child, human, animal, perpetrator and victim. By leaving parts of the canvas untouched with simple brush strokes, the focus predominantly is on the characters. They almost always look straight at you. However, Tamara does not want to tell a straight story. It is the interaction between apparent contradictions: the personal and the universal, reality and fiction, and realism and abstraction. Ambivalent in form and content, the images on the canvases are contrived to make the viewer co-actor in these painted cut-and-paste theatres about power, guilt and shame.
Jisan Ahn (1979, KR) creates oil paintings that exude a poetic and mysterious character. His canvases depict allegorical figures and objects, seemingly born from the profound emotions he infuses them with. Alongside subtlety and restraint, he unveils a raw power in depicting mountain rocks, dark clouds, and storm winds on canvas. The cloudscapes in his work are inspired by 17th-century Dutch Old Masters such as Ruisdael. These atmospheric skies are discernible in Jisan’s work, significantly impacting the viewer and extending an invitation to share in his existential fear.
Jeppe Lauge (1980, DK) goes out into the world, photographing landscapes, cultivated or otherwise. Being out there in nature is a way to see and find the stories of the landscape. Just as people manipulate nature, he manipulates his photos to construct new landscapes in digital collages on his computer. ‘‘When I see a landscape, I see a complex picture, a shaped space to which we added layers over time. In my work, I’m always searching for ways to excavate the layers to know how to relate to them.’’ A painted landscape then arises on the canvas that evokes both recognition and alienation – for on closer inspection, a pine forest proves to be impossibly dense, and a tree turns out to be composed of countless fragments.
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