photos by Jan Tengbergen
Dylan Shields – ARCHETYPES
Work period: July / August
Exhibition: September 4 until November 30, 2013
Mo(nu)ment: Friday November 1, 17-20 hrs
Location: NP3.tmp (M0Bi)
Thanks: Gemeente Groningen, Provincie Groningen, DutchBoxx
Seduction in cardboard
Especially for the container-art-hal NP3.tmp the English artist Dylan Shields developed his exhibition ‘Archetypes’. Fascinated by the mythological power of historical scenes he built this summer with everyday home-garden-and-kitchen equipment such as tape, cardboard boxes, rope, paint and wood, his new, monumental, cardboard sculptures.
With this total installation the visitor emerges in a landscape of Greek mythology, created
of cardboard and tape. With a unique and recognizable artistic handwriting Dylan convinces as well in large, monumental as also small sculptures. His unique way of working, the way he controls the unruly and rigid material and works it out in perfection up to the last detail, arouses amazement and admiration.
The absolutely seducing centerpiece is the almost five meters high Goddess Venus, also known as Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, which knows to enchant the viewer with her voluptuous forms. This monumental work of art depicts the birth of Venus rising from the silver foam and wavy sea.
Different stories and imaginations about lust, love, beauty, suffering but also atrocities are part of the cardboard landscape of Dylan; like Sisyphus who is undergoing his divine punishment for pride, and is doomed to bear up a heavy rock on the steep mountain forever.
To Dylan the special relationship to the traditional, narrative painting matters and his quest for forms of implementation and reconsideration in the NOW. Dylan makes history literally present and perceptible.
