PRESS RELEASE
MELANIE BOSBOOM
play of appearances
Opening: 18 May, 15:00 -19:00 hrs
18 May - 29 June 2013
 
Gallery hours: Thursday to Saturday, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m or by appointment
 
C&H art space is proud to announce “play of appearances”, a solo exhibition by Melanie Bosboom.
 
For this solo exhibition Melanie Bosboom shows her recent photography series. Looking her work it‘s easy to find out her interest for the human figure, its representation and the relationship between the figure and the space. Despite in this photography series she uses herself as a model, her work is not about her as a person. There’s a lot more than that. Her body, her figure is an attribute to the image to create. An important element for the image creation is her studio: a private, intimate and safe place where the artist can work alone, undisturbed; a place where she can explore her imagination and express her dreams.
 
In this photography series Melanie Bosboom plays with the viewer: she‘s not a woman, she’s not a man
and she uses dresses and clothes to camouflage herself. She takes the viewer into a playful world built by her fantasy where there isn‘t a right or wrong. There is actually no image recognizable completely of the woman. Her characters are often covered with layers and layers of clothing, or hidden beneath
coats, or in front of mirrors. Hiding and masking allows her to assume multiple identities in unusual
circumstances and to play with ambiguities and contradictions. These two things fascinate her,
especially the combination of them. What makes something male or female? How can an image
provocative and challenging being at the same time vulnerable and fragile?
 
Melanie Bosboom defines her works as a ’play in progress‘: she doesn’t plan to build up a specific
environment but she arranges the objects creating a working in progress collage until they became fully
integrated with her. What she obtains in the end is a space randomly arranged with any kind of objects.
Working with the objects and the attributes in her studio, the picture gets the expressiveness she is
looking for. Making use of well-known objects but leaving enough space to understand them, she
provokes and encourages the viewer to take an active role in it and to discover new layers in the work. The result is a world full of details and layers of meaning that leaves the viewer with questions and
makes the discovery process continue.
 
Melanie Bosboom, born in Zutphen but now residing in Brummen, graduated from Hogeschool vor the
kunst in Utrecht. Since 1998 she has taken part in numerous group shows mainly in The Nederlands.
She developed a highly personal style, creating photography work where she investigates contradictions and ambiguities. In addiction to her recent photographic work, she created installations in which characters can partake in role-play.
 
During the last exhibition day -June 29th- will be presented a book with an introduction of the art critic
Irene de Craen. The publication is by C&H art space.
 
For more info contact: Cosimo Ricatto
Tel. 06 11 32 32 83 E mail: cosimo@ch-artspace.com

What is an abstract painting? Aren’t all paintings inherently abstract to begin with - in the sense that a painting is always a derivative of reality, a representation in simulated shapes and colours, a series of brushstrokes on a flat surface? In his third solo exhibition at Juliette Jongma Gallery, Tim Braden explores what it means to make abstract paintings. In his attempt to understand them, he decided first to paint existing abstract paintings in situ. The first works he made were views of abstract paintings in the studio of the English painter Patrick Heron (The First Studio, 2012). As a sixteen year old, Braden visited his studio in Cornwall and this made such a big impression on him that he applied to art school soon after, encouraged by Heron himself. "By remaking existing work, I tried to understand the process of making something abstract, and shake off the need for some idea of realism, and thus be freer with my work”, said Braden.
 
Initially, the new paintings of Tim Braden seem quite a big departure from the mostly figurative work he has been making in the past. However, there are certain themes that run throughout his work that can also be identified in his new abstract work. Some of his earlier works deal explicitly with colour, abstract design, and the process of painting or making things, which also was the subject of his previous exhibition in the gallery, called ‘Paleis van Decoratie’. In a way the new group work can be seen as a continuation of this exhibition. Just as Braden treats a piece of fabric or floral wallpaper in his figurative paintings with equal consideration and attention to detail as the spatial environment in which it is located, and thus nullifies the distinction between foreground and background, he now rubs out the differences between figuration and abstraction with the same flat and colourful brushstrokes.
 
The small abstract compositions on card are in fact fragments of interiors: the corner of a room, the hem of a curtain, or the edge of a rug. In the larger paintings Braden goes a step further and zooms in on a specific element or detail in such a way that they lose context and contours and become unrecognizable, literally non-figurative. Even though some of these paintings are quite large, Braden considers them ‘studies’ or ‘research paintings’. They are explorations of colour, of isolated forms in a flat plane, of the effect on the retina of the juxtaposition of pure colours - but not in a dry, scientific sense, for that matter Braden paints with too much flair and virtuosity. His new series of abstract paintings can rather be seen as a celebration of the freedom of paint on canvas.
 
Nina Folkersma
Curator and art critic

In his recent works Thomas Raat uses the aesthetic concepts of what he calls ‘slipstream’ Modernism: the point where the radical aspects of the Avant-garde turn into an apparent convention and where the intersection between form, utility and history becomes paramount. Raat is specifically interested in the notion of the ‘true-false’, the substitute or actually the value of the residue, which he researches by appropriating book cover designs, public sculpture, advertisements and other sources of applied art and design.