October 16th, 2010
One of the highlights according to to audience was the appearance at the keynote sessions of Christophe Szpajdel, ‘The Lord of the Logos’, a legend in heavy-metal logo design. Christophe Szpajdel, born 1970 in Gembloux, Belgium started drawing since the age of three. Already in his early years, fascinated by both nature and the dark side of this world, he forged his vocation in art, despite the orientation of his studies, which were initially Biology and Forestry. Szpajdel began designing logos for metal bands in the ’90s, and thousands of logos later, the artwork of Christophe Szpajdel stands out among the usual lightning strokes, skulls and flames.
Januari 2010 Gestalten Publishers relased his book and they did a wonderful job juxtaposing Szpajdel’s photos and logos. From the Gestalten website: “This book is a collection of work by Christophe Szpajdel, an artist whose fans in the underground black metal community worship him as the Lord of the Logos. It includes hundreds of powerful logos, each of which captures the force of this musical genre anew. Through his surprising use of aesthetic influences such as art deco and nature, Szpajdel has brought a new dynamic into the gothic visuality of heavy metal. This publication, which is done in the style of a black prayerbook, shows not only how he has succeeded in leaving his own visual mark on this music, but how he has also expanded the canon of forms it uses.” Check out the book here.
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October 15th, 2010
ROB VAN DER HOEVEN & BIRGIT VERWER
Although Rob van der Hoeven uses the occasional cliché, he does it in such an ironic and ingenious way that the view he presents is both palatable and unfamiliar. Rob’s works, pressed from molds in polystyrene, are almost iconic through their use of just a few colors per work and the translation of ideas into simple, cartoon-like, images. His socially critical works mostly express the complexity of our society in which the relation between offender and victim can be unclear. His images are presented in bite-size pieces with just one message per work, reinforced by a text.
Birgit Verwer’s impressive and exuberant sculptures are assembled from found and collected materials and have a socially critical aspect to them. The glamorous decors of eighties game shows are mainly what inspires her. On closer examination, these decors were not at all as glamorous as they appeared to be: they were merely facades in which nothing was what it seemed to be and in which life was presented as a game.
www.robvanderhoeven.nl
www.birgitverwer.com
www.bobsmit.com
BOB SMIT GALLERY
EENDRACHTSPLEIN 16
30 OCT > 28 NOV
12:30 _ 19:00 HRS
OPENING 30 OCT
15:00 HRS
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October 15th, 2010
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LOCATIE
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October 15th, 2010
Melle de Boer, Ernest Utermark and Hans Kievit graduated from the illustration department of the Rotterdam Willem de Kooning Academie in the mid-nineties. They had their exhibition together at Blaak10 Gallery during the Image Festival in Rotterdam.
Melle de Boer (1972) exhibited a part of his collection of ‘Commodore 64 drawings’. These drawings are inspired by the old-fashioned home computer games of the eighties, which as a child he played for hours on end. For Melle de Boer these games are the ultimate representation of a one-dimensional world: you win if you manage to escape from the monster, you can reach higher levels and improve the highscore – it’s an exhilarating world. The Commodore 64 drawings were included in Melle de Boer’s latest publication ‘Melleville’, together with a CD by his band ‘John Dear Mowing Club’. In March 2010, Melle de Boer exhibited a part of this series at the New York Pulse Art Fair.
‘No prattle but pictures’ Ernest Utermark (1967) is a collector and illustrator who has devised and compiled several theme exhibitions in the ‘Gemeentemuseum Den Haag’. His illustrations are created by hand-cutting, trimming and pasting all kinds of images. By shifting and combining elements, he creates evocative collages in a very personal and recognizable style. His materials come from his extensive and systematically filed archive of images which contains any conceivable subject. Computers, so awkwardly modern, have no place in collagist Utermark’s world. During the Image Festival we had the book launch of his Ernest Utermark’s ABC’. The original 3-D collages for the 26 letters from the book ‘Ernest Utermark’s ABC’, were showed on the ground floor.
‘Man of Clay’ Hans Kievit (1966) is undoubtedly the Dutch artist most specialised in making clay figures, hence the nickname ‘Man of Clay’. He has made hundreds of minutely detailled clay figurines for use in advertising leaflets or magazines. The clay characters are built around wire frames and painted with acrylic paint before being photographed. Hans Kievit’s clay figure illustrations have been used by BASF, Malmberg, ABN-AMRO, Nutricia, Playboy, Dixons, the NS, Volkskrant Magazine, V&D and the Ministry of Agriculture. The Image Festival at Blaak 10 Gallery brought two specially commisioned large-scale figures by Hans Kievit, representing the festivals theme: ‘Image & Music’.
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