CEES KRIJNEN 'THE ULTIMATE SELF-PORTRAIT'

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For over a decade Dutch artist Cees Krijnen has made art ' sculpture, drawing, photography, performance - from the raw material of his own life. His final show at the Rijksakademie initiated the continuing project 'Woman in Divorce Battle', dealing with the aftermath of his mother's messy divorce and subsequent life as a single woman. In his new work he turns to his father: or rather to the gap left during his adolescence by a father who as a sea-captain was emotionally and physically absent. A gap to be filled by his three most significant art tutors, the father-figures who Krijnen acknowledges formed him as a man and as an artist. In this exhibition, along with a sculpture of his own, Krijnen displays work by those tutors: from school, Ronald Ruseler, Arthur Kempenaar from art college, and finally Michelangelo Pistoletto, who was one of his judges for that final Rijksakademie show, and who from then on became his aesthetic and political mentor.