September 16th - October 16th **opening Friday September 16th 5pm**
The stakes are high in André Kruysen (The Hague, 1967) and Tirzo Martha's (Curaçao, 1965) sculptures and spatial installations because they are about The Truth (E Berdat, The Truth). As children both artists were through their parents exposed to the Jehovah's Witnesses community and to their belief system referred to as The Truth. You were either In the Truth or you were Out of the Truth.
In both artists we trace the lineage of their creative processes back to this indoctrination. Cutting across cultural backgrounds is a unifying desire for truthfulness. Where André rejects the hollow rhetoric of Modernism and attempts to infuse the material with an inherent truth, Tirzo uses art as a means to form communities and collaborations that stimulate the development of new ideas and ultimately improve society. We are prompted to think: “Is it about exposing the urgent realities of our daily lives only to forget them again later on. Is it about objects we once experienced as very pivotal in our lives; objects to which we later became indifferent and ultimately abandoned and neglected?”
André Kruysen's truth is contained in serene, almost exalted images that alternately lean on modernism or oppose it. André utilizes casts of modernist shapes (such as the mudguard of a VW Beetle) in his plaster and Plasticrète constructions. He imbues those shapes with a new meaning that transcends not only the austere functionalism of a now faded modernism but which also rises above the still prevalent postmodernist void. André investigates the interiority of an object and then exposes it by making holes and openings in the sculptures. These entryways determine the viewing direction and more or less suck you into the work. You find yourself nestled in the soul of the sculpture.
The truth in Tirzo Martha's multimedia installations and sculptures is ambiguous, eclectic; important religious, political, social and animistic truths are intertwined with banal symbols from different cultures. The works are incantations that radiate a tremendous energy while at the same time appear to mock the truths we think we know based on our own cultural backgrounds. Each object in Tirzo's work has a history all its own. By forging them into new compositions outside of their respective comfort zones, a new, differentiated and infinitely layered story is told. Together the titles of the compositions and the objects inform an important aspect of the work; often surprising, sometimes cryptic, and at first glance show little coherence. At times they are an objective description or a sober observation. In other iterations they refer to his native island Curaçao. But mostly they float in a no man's land somewhere between dream, reality, the truth and fantasy.
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