Alex van Warmerdam

About

The exhibition is titled Apparitions and consists of paintings of figures. These figures are depicted in a landscape or an interior, alone or with company—some in full-length, others only their heads.

These figures, or apparitions, often seem foreign to their environment. Some are too large for the space they emerge from or appear in. Others are awkwardly proportioned, their limbs out of size to the rest of their bodies, or we look at them from a strange perspective.

The figures are based on various images that Van Warmerdam has been collecting for years. Personages or characters are found in books or on the internet, interiors and landscapes in old magazines, or in his personal photographic archive. The images must offer him something picturesque and should contain elements that he can use to interpret freely; to underscore, to obscure or both in terms of color, form and composition.

With the portraits in the exhibition, Van Warmerdam refers to Tronies. A tronie was a portrait study of a nameless model, especially in the 16th century. Painting these heads – the old Dutch meaning of the word – was not about representing the identity of the sitter or the correct resemblance to their appearance, but about the depiction of a character, a state of mind, about expressing facial features and emotions.

Van Warmerdam is mainly concerned with the look of the face and the unrealistic use of color. The photo could be of a politician, a murderer or a farm girl, but he forgets their identity as quickly as possible.

Downstairs in the gallery, Van Warmderdam shows two video installations previously shown in his exhibition at the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. The mobility of thought becomes visible in the stop-motion film of an ever-changing painting. Creatures of the Forest is a stream of images of people, animals, plants, views and rooms, which flow into each other. Each new image builds on the previous one. It is a film about painting itself.