Noise! Frans Hals, Otherwise

About

There is movement in the work of the seventeenth-century painter Frans Hals. A movement towards noise: the disintegration of order and form. This is not only true of Hals’s loose and free painterly style but also of his choice of subjects. As well as depicting wealthy members of society, Hals also introduced people of lower social standings into his portrait paintings. With this innovative approach, Frans Hals thus opened up the genre of portraiture.

Taking these aspects of Hals’s work as points of departure, the exhibition Noise! Frans Hals, Otherwise brings together contemporary artworks that similarly play with and speculate on the notion of portraiture and its meaning today. Across four chapters, the relation of these works to topics such as representation, identity and agency within contemporary visual culture is developed, while the works themselves, along with selected works by Hals, grow progressively noisier.

With: Anna-Sophie Berger, Vittorio Brodmann, Xinyi Cheng, Stephan Dillemuth, Nicole Eisenman, Hamishi Farah, Justin John Greene, Ivy Haldeman, Tom Humphreys, Jacqueline De Jong, Özgür Kar, Kiki Kogelnik, Sarah Lucas, Perri MacKenzie, Alan Michael, Jill Mulleady, Simphiwe Ndzube, Josip Novosel, HC Playner, Pilvi Takala, Siebren Versteeg, Gillian Wearing