bur0 Gr0ningen
GRIP – land art project
Jan van der Ploeg
October 8, 2015 until January 29, 2016
A special DUO opening GRIP on Saturday October 3, 2015:
Lunch 13 hrs at Atelier aan de Middendijk 8, Usquert
Drinks 17 hrs at bur0 Gr0ningen, Hofstraat 21
GRIP – land art project is the collaboration between Jan van der Ploeg, Atelier aan de Middendijk and NP3. Atelier aan de Middendijk connects contemporary art and design to the technological development in the province of Groningen to achieve a different landscape experience. The exhibition will be on display in bur0 Gr0ningen, the ‘white cube’ art space of NP3.
Atelier aan de Middendijk
Dirk-Jan Visser and Christian Ernsten, bought Atelier aan de Middendijk in 2011 from biologist and anthropologist Jos Nienhuis and made his ‘legacy’ to their artistic starting point. Not only Nienhuis created a wild garden as a natural habitat for the snail, he also experimented with low energy life. Nienhuis fought as such, in his own way, against the commercialization of the use of land and the effects of land consolidation. At the same time he was inspired by the design of the land. In response he created the wild garden of the Atelier in sharp geometric lines. The curators of the Atelier saw in the design of the polder land and the wild garden at the Middendijk a challenge for Van der Ploeg’s approach and invited him for a residence.
Jan van der Ploeg
Jan van der Ploeg is best known for his wall paintings. His great fascination and inspiration from existing patterns, forms and colors of design, landscapes and architecture is an indispensable part of his work. He usually works with a combination of strong colors and forms in different dimensions and responds to the architecture of buildings and public spaces. His GRIP motive is derived from the oval handgrips of moving boxes and since the nineties an important part of the work of Jan van der Ploeg. Van der Ploeg’s first GRIP works appeared in 1997 on buildings and backyards in Amsterdam. In the meantime his work is shown all over the world, in among others the Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Sarah Cottier Gallery in Sydney.
GRIP
Van der Ploeg responded during his residency in the Atelier in Usquert on the radical design choices of Nienhuis. The semi-permanent work in the Atelier is a wall painting in the corner room on the east side of the house. He restored the present phosphorus yellow / green and integrated it into a new color scheme for the room. Van der Ploeg’s wall painting uses the colors of the rising sun to illuminate the room. Van der Ploeg brought the landscape inside.
In the period of his residency he came into contact with artist Corrie de Boer, the partner of the in 2007 deceased Albert Waalkens. Partly as a result of this encounter, Van der Ploeg conceived the plan for a land art design in the second part of his residency. The work of the American artist Dennis Oppenheim, who in 1969 at the invitation of farmer Albert Waalkens made the works “Cancelled Crop” and “Directed Seeding” in a field in Finsterwolde, was for Van der Ploeg an important source of inspiration for the development of GRIP – land art project.
Together with two young farmers Van der Ploeg created the immense GRIP form in the Groninger Hoogeland.
GRIP at bur0 Gr0ningen will show GRIP in the context of his residency in Atelier aan de Middendijk at the Hoogeland, the land art project, drawings and Van der Ploeg designed specially for bur0 Gr0ningen a new wall painting.
Jan van der Ploeg PAINTING No.0701 GRIP, 2007 150 x 112,5 cm. acrylic on canvas