De Gruyter & Andeweg

19 March - 21 May 2017
Opening: Saturday 18 March at 17:00 hrs
Location: Stroom Den Haag, Hogewal 1-9, The Hague
Open: Wednesday - Sunday, 12- 17 hrs


Reaction Stroom concerning reporting NRC Handelsblad (dd. 31 October 2020) on serious accusations of sexual misconduct in the world of the visual arts and specifically the artist Juliaan Andeweg >> read here.

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Saturday 6 May, 15 hrs:
Stroom School De Gruyter & Andeweg

An afternoon on imagination.... An informal meeting with background stories, interviews and conversations.

This spring, Stroom presents an exhibition with new work by two artists known for forging their own path: Voebe de Gruyter and Juliaan Andeweg. The exhibition focuses on the subtle but unmistakable kinship seen in their work, presenting a new perspective on their respective practices. While at first glance, De Gruyter and Andeweg are quite different - in terms of their approach, generation and the appearance of their work - their fascinations, influences and visual themes are actually remarkably similar. The result is a conceptual game with the narrative potential of various materials.

Both Voebe de Gruyter and Juliaan Andeweg experiment with the capacity of immaterial qualities and circumstances to nestle in physical matter. These different meanings can reside in matter as a kind of ‘memory' or power. In the process, the fundamental laws of nature are challenged by apprehensions, coincidences, intuitive connections and poetic patterns.

De Gruyter and Andeweg share a specific fascination with the mythical deity Hermes. In Andeweg's birth year, De Gruyter graduated from Amsterdam's Gerrit Rietveld Academie with a project about Hermes, the protector of thieves, travellers and crossroads. For Andeweg, Hermes embodies the change that underlies artistic production. As such, the god symbolises the younger artist's own practice. Thirty years later, both artists remain interested in the changes that Hermes has undergone in pagan, Christian and contemporary iconographies.

The exhibition De Gruyter & Andeweg expands various cultural, public, iconographic and para-scientific references into paintings, drawings, projections and installations. It takes the complementary equilibrium between the work of these two interesting artists as its point of departure. De Gruyter and Andeweg encounter each other at very different stages in their respective careers. Back in The Hague.

Voebe de Gruyter (The Hague, 1960)
Voebe de Gruyter's oeuvre can be described as narrative conceptual art. In her work, De Gruyter approaches the world as a complex of constantly interacting processes. She shows that the objects that surround us have a far deeper impact on us that we generally assume. To support this position, she uses non-committal - and often witty - references to accepted lines of reasoning and academic ideas. De Gruyter is not interested in uncovering the truth; rather, she hopes to visualise the agile nature of our visual perception, both in language and images. Voebe de Gruyter lives and works in Brussels. She studied at Gerrit Rietveld Academie and was a resident artist at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam, ISP in New York and Cité des Arts in Paris. Her work is included in the collections of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Museum Arnhem and Bouwfonds, among other institutions.
www.voebedegruyter.be
www.galerievangelder.com

Juliaan Andeweg (The Hague, 1986)
Juliaan Andeweg is a graduate of the Royal Academy of Art The Hague and worked as a resident artist at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam in 2015-2016. Andeweg sees the process of artistic production as a Romantic, contemporary form of alchemy. His installations, sculptures and painting are inspired by philosophical, occult and religious interests, which inform the precise manipulation of matter and space. At the same time, the artist makes enthusiastic use of sources from pop culture and banal and vernacular imagery. These incorporate references to a timeless symbolism and the merging of urban subcultures, fleeting obsessions, media archives and an inexhaustible stream of images.
www.juliaanandeweg.nl
www.gmvz.com

The exhibition De Gruyter & Andeweg is made possible in part by Galerie Martin van Zomeren, Galerie van Gelder, the Mondriaan Fund and the City of The Hague.

De Gruyter & Andeweg
'De Gruyter & Andeweg', Stroom Den Haag, 2017 (Voebe de Gruyter, 'The Psychogeografic Purchase')
photo: Gerrit Schreurs, courtesy Stroom Den Haag
'De Gruyter & Andeweg', Stroom Den Haag, 2017 (Juliaan Andeweg, 'Boreas')
photo: Gerrit Schreurs, courtesy Stroom Den Haag
'De Gruyter & Andeweg', Stroom Den Haag, 2017
photo: Gerrit Schreurs, courtesy Stroom Den Haag
'De Gruyter & Andeweg', Stroom Den Haag, 2017 (Voebe de Gruyter, 'Lithuanian Refrigerator)
photo: Gerrit Schreurs, courtesy Stroom Den Haag