Experimenting in photography and more specifically, experimenting with light on film is Katja Mater’s field of activity. She analyses light and shows us how it is captured in a lightproof box. The spectator is put to work. 

For a number of years Heden has been following and collecting Katja Mater’s work. The searching examination that characterizes her photographs does particularly appeal to Heden. Katja Mater employs the basic elements of photography, namely light and sensitive film. At first sight, it doesn’t exactly yield ‘beautiful’ pictures but, after all, that is not Katja Mater’s main purpose. Apparently, she very much enjoys searching the bounds of photography, and persuades the viewer to have a closer look. In her own words: “Instead of looking through photography – as a sort of transparent medium – my aim is to show the viewer photography itself.”  

The exhibition includes works that have been produced during the past year. There will also be a presentation of the publication Study on Colour by Katja Mater.  A number of artworks from the exhibition will be added to the collection of Heden, and will be available for you as from February next year.  

Artist talk with Wiebe van der Hoeven
Wednesday the 24th of February, 19.30.
You can apply for this event by sending an email to arthur@heden.nl
Entrance is free.

This sunday the 7th of february, a new exhibition by Wiebe van der Hoeven In search of the postmiraculous will openend at Heden. 

At Wiebe van der Hoeven’s final exam exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts (KABK) in The Hague, Heden has quite recently acquired a pocket-sized artwork. It is a sculpture made out of hair and nail clippings of the artist himself and represents the smallest artwork in Heden’s collection. It is a relic. The peculiar aspect of this artwork is that although it is quite small, it looks quite big.  

In addition, this sculpture has the form of some kind of monument you could encounter in a square in Budapest or Beijing, and with such proportions you could drive under it. So, Wiebe van der Hoeven creates monuments. He is not afraid of big gestures. He is made for theatre. Raised with the Bible, he is familiar with grand stories. He clearly renders account of the fact that a lot of things have happened before his time. There are many traces of general and art history in his work, but he uses them without citing, and that is his quality. This puts his work in another way on a higher level.

Opening of the solo exhibition Boys Don’t Cry of Twan Janssen at Heden on Sunday 21 March 2010 at 1:00pm 

Twan Janssen is an actor who plays the role of the artist Twan Janssen. The works he produces are stage properties in the play of his career.  At this exhibition Janssen shows his latest works consisting of handkerchief, mirror, and school punishment paintings. The title of the exhibition seems to refer to repressing and coping with loss, all within the frames of the art of painting. For this determines what he particularly is: a painter. 

He is a painter with an unorthodox approach of painting. Instead of painting colours on canvas with brushes, as is commonly done, he first dries the paint in long strips and then plaits them on a canvas. Or they are attached with magnets to the canvas as a piece of paint. This way the logical dichotomy of canvas and base are disconnected and we can look again at the painting with a fresh view. 

Heden will present a publication of Twan Janssen on the occasion of the exhibition. Some artworks at the exhibition will be included in Heden’s collection and will be available for rent. The artist will make a special edition of a series of handkerchief paintings, especially for the exhibition.

Ton Schuttelaar, Jeroen Bosch, Lizan Freijsen, Daan Samson, Julika Rudelius, Pilvi Takala en Hugo Schuitemaker

With Applied Reality, Heden gets artists together for whom everyday reality not only is a source of inspiration, but apparently also at the same moment the artwork itself. Whether this reality does concern your own personal life, the wondrous world of advertising and corporate business, or something you come across in the street: the artworks at this exhibition very much resemble a reality which you also, and especially, will find outside the art world. Not applied art, but reality applied.

Koen Kleijn, art historian and journalist, wrote the essay Brave new reality for this exhibition. You can download it here.

Heden’s new season will kick off with a duo exhibition of painters who give account of the tradition in which they are, for which they have chosen. One of them paints in the abstract, the other figurative. One of them paints mainly without colour, the other expressly with colour. The first one contemplatively, calculating, the other, on the contrary, very passionately.

Linda Arts (Beneden Leeuwen, 1971) makes abstract paintings. To explain it analytically, her paintings show a change of white via grey to black, or the other way around. By putting these areas in relation to each other in a mathematical way an image comes into being, whereby volumes seem to exist. Seemingly for this is not really happening. If you take a closer look you will find out that the works are painted by hand. Precisely, indeed, but with faults, or at least: imperfections.

Kristina Schuldt (Moscow, 1982) has made imperfection her subject, for example, the banishment from the Garden of Eden, or eating from the apple as the source of all the trouble that actually has never ended. To be more precisely: the constant battle between people, for example, the one between the sexes, the battle inside yourself, vanity; the battle for power. She paints people in a powerful, expressive way. The unmistakable pleasure she gets out of making these paintings makes this battle almost comical, and therefore bearable.

With the emphasis on the differences between these two painters we are only halfway, the similarities probably being equally big. Come and have a look!

The opening of this exhibition will be on Sunday 5 September 2010 at 1.00pm. On Saturday night 4 September during the Museum Night The Hague you can get a taste.

Publication!On the occasion of the exhibition an edition in a luxurious cover with a print of both artists will be published.

Kristina Schuldt, Die Abraumerin, etching, 2010

Linda Arts, #117, C-print and silk screen, 2010

Limited edition: 20 prints
Size: 40-55 cm (external dimensions)
The prepublication price of this splendid publication is 350 euro, and also during the opening. Thereafter the price is 400 euro.