Christiaan Bastiaans: Pharmacy Deux Milles

About

‘Pharmacy Deux Milles’ is a major solo exhibition presenting over thirty new artworks by Dutch artist Christiaan Bastiaans. His work explores the extremes of the human condition by engaging with people whose daily existence is dominated by a struggle for survival. In his earlier work, these ‘hurt models’, as he calls them, have included victims of war, socio-economic crises and social isolation.

Bastiaans’s exhibition at Looiersgracht 60 is not to be understood apart from the rest of the artist’s oeuvre. ‘Pharmacy Deux Milles’ continues to explore the lives of people trapped in trying situations. This exhibition however shifts the focus from factors outside the body that strip away a person’s humanity, to the innermost of biological factors: a person’s genetics. ‘Pharmacy Deux Milles’ brings to centre stage another type of ‘hurt model’: those who find themselves estranged from society due to mental and physical genetic defects.   

The exhibition is a multimedia visual art project with a strong basis in scientific research, philosophy, literature and critical theory. Through video works, notebooks, watercolours, drawings, textiles, assemblages and prints, Bastiaans seeks to re-humanise the 'hurt models' in the beholder’s understanding.

Biography  

Dutch artist Christiaan Bastiaans (born in 1951 in Amsterdam) is fascinated by the extremes of the human condition. Through his interdisciplinary projects and artworks he explores the themes of displacement, mortality, survival instincts, vulnerability and protection.  Bastiaans studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, the Pratt Institute in New York City and the Kyoto City University of Arts.  His work has been exhibited at the Paris Biennale, the New Museum in New York, the Venice Biennale, De Appel Arts Centre in Amsterdam, the De Pont Museum in Tilburg and the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo (Netherlands).