A GOOD DAY WITH HESTER by DE.GROEN FINE.ART.COLLECTION

De.GROEN

fine.art.collection

A GOOD DAY WITH HESTER

a 3 - day intervention SHOOTINGSTAR.00

PLEASE DON’T MESS UP A BALANCED EXHIBITION!

THE BLACK HOLE

The former head of the fine art department warned us many times about the black hole we would fall into after the academy. A graduating student told me that it was ‘not done’ to exhibit outside the academy during your studies. You had to be busy for at least 10 years until you could show good work.

I didn’t follow either advices, the black hole didn’t appear and we made our own exhibitions in a large squatted building during our time at the academy.

The time at the academy was like a whirlwind, we did not agree with anything and behaved like it. We really wanted to show our work, but we only had the hallway in the Rietveld-building at our disposal. Still, it felt like the first place where a larger audience could see your work. But being contradictory, we wanted more, our work had to be out in the world, so we squatted a building and called it the PALACE OF BEAUTIFUL ARTS. Sixteen young artists of all disciplines joined together and had the building opened by the then director of the academy. The tone was set, we had broken away from the safe haven of home. At the same time, it was this safe haven that embraced us, supported us and shared our enthusiasm. But perhaps even more important is the fact that at the academy, you get energy from each other, from the teachers, from criticism, from different opinions. Working together, being in each other’s studios, that forms you and gives you enough self-confidence to enter the world of art.

This is the second time that I have been a ‘guest’ with my students at DE.GROEN. The first time was during a one-night show in which I was interviewed as a so-called influencer by Fenne Saedt. During the show the students subsequently presented my works live to the public and exhibited their own work in the bar of DE.GROEN. This time, it is more radical and their work is temporarily hanging among my carefully arranged solo exhibition FIXING AIR

The special aspect is that Marjolein and Peter paid each student a studio visit. I, as their tutor, was not involved so that they could look at the work completely out of the blue and make a choice. In this way, both the student, the collection and myself are surprised by the final choice. The temporary intervention: A GOOD DAY WITH HESTER is an experiment, a challenging and absurd idea, and that is exactly what I am curious about.

Hester Oerlemans

A GOOD DAY WITH HESTER

“A GOOD DAY WITH HESTER is an experiment, a challenging and absurd idea which is exactly what I am curious about.” These are the words with which Oerlemans concludes her text for this publication. It is true what she writes. An experiment that began as an idea, a small plan that was ultimately carried out. As collectors, we went to visit Oerlemans’ students at ArtEZ. Every student at the academy has a sort of mini-atelier at his or her disposal. A separate corner that is only for him or her. They can work there. Not undisturbed, though, because all the separate corners are connected to the reality and movements of their fellow students. They have conversations and smalltalk with each other. They look at and talk about each other’s work and surely also about the big questions of life. And we walked among them. In two days, we made thirteen visits to the studios, all in accordance with the schedule.

The goal was to select a work of each student that would become part of the experiment that Hester calls challenging and absurd. The plan in which the works we selected are temporarily on show in the

exhibition FIXING AIR by Hester Oerlemans at DE.GROEN. Something like that is actually ‘not done’. You don’t do that; you don’t mess up a balanced exhibition. But doing something that is “not done” attracts you, so you are going to do it. Not only Oerlemans is sensitive to this, but so are we, and definitely Hester’s students. They want to show their work.

Those students are all different. As young as they are, each of them has his or her own unique focus on what he or she thinks and does. Strangely enough, there is no uneasiness or nerves. The students and we are alike, it seems. We noticed that it is a great pleasure and privilege for our generation to speak with these young people -artists on the way- about what moves them and what makes them want to make things. Everyone has their own corner of the studio. Sometimes very structured and conveniently arranged, sometimes dominated by a pleasant chaos and it is clear that we are in the middle of a work process. There are big differences in how they think and what they make. Yet there is a veil of kinship over everything we see. Is that Oerlemans’ work or is it the

students themselves who connect? It must be a bit of both. At the end of each visit, we made a selection of the work together with the student.

When we look back on these studio visits, we see that the process of thinking and making fascinated us. We could not expect to uncover thirteen masterpieces. When you look at the works of the students in this exhibition, you primarily look at what is going on. What occupies them, what do they think about and how they struggle with the technique of the making. Whether you paint or photograph, work spatially, make films or installations. In everything you see the process and the drive to make. In some students you see the doubt and in others the enormous certainty. All this together made it special. Would this have been normal studio visits and thus similar to the way we so often visit artists? In a way, yes; the curiosity to look, to see

and hear new things. But in the end it was really different. These studio visits were all first introductions, discovery trips. So we were certainly cautious and sometimes wary. With an artist we already know and

whom we ourselves choose to visit, this is not the case and we are more likely to look for the edges, the hooks and the hidden corners. The conversation can then quickly

become more substantive.

Is Hester, with this experiment, once again pushing the boundaries, curious as she is?

What is certain is that with this experiment she is confronting her students with the outside world. A studio encounter with two art collectors is certainly not commonplace for these students. The protective shell of the academy briefly falls away. Call it a learning moment or an experience. For us as collectors, it was very rewarding.

The fact that Hester Oerlemans concluded this experiment with an intervention, unorthodox and not without risk, is Oerlemans all over. For Hester, this is once again walking a tightrope or hanging on by a thread. She inspires her students with this too. And we of DE.GROEN could see into the future for a brief moment, played along in the experiment and gave space to Hester and her students.

Marjolein de Groen & Peter Jordaan

WIJA DE BOER

2000, Meppel / year 3

I was thinking that I made the best photographs of all time. They were photographs of an intimate, loving and special moment. I was daydreaming about how the negatives would develop and how big I would present them. It turned out that the shutter of the camera stopped opening after two times of shooting. Once developed, the intimate moment took a different shape when becoming a photograph.

Ink on paper

137 x 80 cm

LATENT

LYNN BROERTJES

1995, Amsterdam / year 4

The path from what you already know to what you don’t know yet. The world of perception, which is revealed to us through our senses. We seem to know this well at first glance. It goes without saying because we don’t need any tools or calculations to access it. To really get through to reality we just seem to have to open our eyes and let life come to us.

I can’t see depth! I have taught myself the depth that I perceive, but that is my reality. In my case, realizing that you are different, or look different, has often aroused an insecure feeling. Do they understand me if I am different? Am I included?

TEGENWIND

Photograph, paper (120 - 160 gr), semi glossy 59,4 x 42 cm

IRENE DONATINI

2000, Siena, Italy / year 1

As living beings, our fascination towards decay is really about the mystery of life and death. We cannot grasp the concept of eternity, but as we isolate the moment between two phases and extract it out of its context, a feeling of possibility takes over: it’s not life nor death, but the limbo where we know what will happen, yet we still have to experience it.

Many aspects of our everyday life are limbos between phases. What’s the exact moment in which we fall asleep, and start dreaming? Does it take less than a second or is it a process that takes long minutes? Would it be possible to isolate that, and extract it out of its context?

This work is a dialogue between pictures and audio. The pictures depict empty spaces and isolated pieces of the city center of Arnhem, while the audio is a patchwork of sleep-talks I recorded of myself: fragments of conversations from my dreams, unintelligible words in both Italian and English. My goal is to document the limbo that defines the passage from one phase to another, and expand it in a longer state of the mind that can possibly and theoretically become infinite.

I WAS ABOUT TO DREAM OF YOU Video

DANTE VAN ELBURG

1997, Terborg / year 4

The good student reads all the books and does not forget anything.

The good student knows who paints what.

The good student knows how they paint it.

The good student wants to paint like them.

The good student does not know what to paint.

GOEDE STUDENT Oil on Canvas 50 x 70 cm

HEIDI FITRI

1998, Bogor, Indonesia / year 2

THEY WEAVE ME INTO A WOMAN, I WEAVE MYSELF INTO A MASOCHIST

That’s the sentence that rings in the back of my head while I continue rolling the clay under my soft palm.

Slowly unlearning what I have been toxically taught about my existence and about my body. Forcing myself to take back what have been taken away from me. My power, my magic, my beauty.

Years and years of constant pressure of being a perfect skinny submissive virgin has been long gone. It has been destroyed but not forgotten.

The woman in the mirror never told me that I have to be skinny, fair skinned and submissive. The woman inside me told me that I don’t need to compete. The goddess inside me told me that I only have to nurture and love, and that’s what I did. I started seeing my body not as a battle ground but as a shiny strong armor, I see her as a garden on an never ending spring, I see her as mine and just mine.

I don’t allow anything to be taken away from me again, I don’t allow anyone to try and destroy me.

So, let me change the sentence real quick.

They did weave me into a woman, and I’m slowly weaving myself into a goddess.

YOU’RE A WHORE

Ceramic 22 x 10 cm

TICO GEURTZEN

1994, Doetinchem / year 1

IN THE SUMMERS WE DRIVE

The paint of my memory

Has dried long ago

And it still stains

Crinkling roads

Floating heat

Pizza armpits

Sweaty seats

In the summers, we, five

In the summers we sing

In the summers we drive to the camping

Watch the sea rise behind the hills

Smell while cicada’s sing among pines

Feel the hot stones tickle your feet

Hear the waves dance in front of the beach

In the summers there’s music

In the summers there’s life

I remember the joy

In the summers we drive

POUR ON THE FLOOR

Linoleum, blockprinting paint, bucket, tape

50 x 50 x 50 cm

ÞURÍÐUR HANNESDOTIR

1999, Patreksfjörður, Iceland / year 1

I miss mountains.

SUITCASE

Photograph

42 x 29,7 cm

PAUL HEUSINKVELD

1997, Amersfoort / year 4

ZINGZAW, 2021

Metal and ceramics

78 x 14 cm

HANKYUL JEONG

1999 Seoul, Korea / year 2

In Korea, the word of family means eating together. Because there is an eight-hour time difference between Korea and the Netherlands, I see my family eats dinner through my phone screen while I am here eating breakfast. Food for me is not just a thing, it’s not just a a meal to fill up my belly, but it is so much more. Food can be the identity of the environment I have lived in, the medium between people, and something that everyone in the world can commonly enjoy. I want to find new perspectives on discovering food and the relationship we have with it, through various experimental activities, participatory workshops, records, and archiving humorously. It is landscape photography that combines different food ingredients depending on environmental factors, also landmarks from different countries. It’s interesting to see something strange, like eating Korean dinner and English breakfast once, flowers blooming on dry soil, the completely different but similar landscape under two moons, and a light bulb spreading darkness. All the ingredients in the landscape come from different school lunch ingredients from each country, and images collaged from the Albert Heijn Bonus folder are converted from medium to real food, allowing the audience to experience something strange in time and space.

TODAY’S MENU FOR THE EARTH: LANDSCAPE

Digital Photography with mixed materials of collage and food ingredients 50 x 66 cm

JELLE VAN KUILENBURG

WILD RIDE

A train storms past me. A big white cloud erupts from the locomotive’s chimney, casting a large shadow over the landscape. The scene and especially the smoke are wildly overwhelming. Half of my vision is now tainted white, and the smoke is tingling in my lungs. I cannot see where this train is storming towards when it takes a corner and vanishes behind the mountain as quickly as it arrived. The scene returns to normal as if the train never existed, for all I know the track ended after that corner.

An artistic practice is a bit like taking a train ride, dragging your inspirations, sources and works behind the locomotive that is your artistic practice. Storming towards your goals you cannot always see what is around the corner, only a suggestion of what could be there. Slowly but surely, you puff towards your goals. Another cup of coffee, maybe another smoke, and the next station is in sight. You will never know what is awaiting you there until you arrive, but the spectacular mountain landscape will surely make for a wild ride full of possibilities.

WILD RIDE, 2020

Wooden panel, ink drawing on paper, gouache, burlap, plaster 80 x 80 cm

/ year 4

2000, Tiel

LEVI OVERVEST

1998, Arnhem / year 2

In the late 50s or early 60s, a fine Irish tailor picked a very fine fabric imported from America. Years of practice and a keen eye made him create a jacket out of it in no time. It wasn’t hanging in his front shop for very long because it took the interest of a costumer.

An old man from Brussels however, saw the red stripes as a reminder of the 20s when he could still impress the ladies in a swimming suit striped like this jacket. Just a few years later when the old man passed away, his son gave away the jacket, along with the whole wardrobe of the old man, to an Algerian woman selling second hand clothing on the markets of Brussels. It must have been on one of these markets that my grandfather fell for the jacket. The fact that it made him look like a circus master did not seem to bother him. He took it home where, as far as my knowledge goes, he never wore it. Not in my memory nor in any pictures that I can recall. Nonetheless, when he too passed away it was my niece who picked this jacket to remember him by. She took it home where I, five years later, asked if I could have it because I got the idea that it might be a good addition to my wardrobe. It wasn’t. Its not a nice fit on me and I have no clothes that goes well with it. But still I was obsessed with it. So to give it a place in my life, I painted it. If she will have it I will give the painting together with the jacket back to my niece.

GESTREEPT JASJE

Oil on canvas

60 x 40 cm

ZORA SEL

1999, Apeldoorn / year 4

It was very nice to see Marjolein de Groen and Peter Jordaan. When they visited us after our green light, almost everyone of us had already drank one beer. This meant we were a bit extra cheerful. We went outside to the garden to drink some tea and eat the very nice cookies that Hester facilitated. Almost nobody ate the bitterkoekjes because I think the other cookies were more special. Maybe we can still make pudding out of the leftover bitterkoekjes.

MAY BE GOING ONCE GOING TWICE

Oil on canvas

80 x 60 cm

RO SMIT

1997, Utrecht / year 2

Working and uplifting items that people might disregard because they outgrow their use. In this work, I’m using old socks and textile. I don’t like to say that I fixed them but more that I try to give them a new life, into something that people can connect to again. And to care more of the things around them. I get energy and comfort out of the things I collect. They live beside me and I would always try to find a way to keep them close and make them into something new, the relation between object and human is for me very interesting and I am also interested in working with materials that already exist in this world to make a new object/thing out of it.

TO BE LOVED BY

Textile (old socks)

42 x 69 cm / 32-42 x 15 cm each

COLOFON

This publication appears with the 3-day intervention by 13 students of ArtEZ in the exhibition FIXING AIR by Hester Oerlemans at DE.GROEN Fine Art Collection.

Idea and organization : Marjolein de Groen, Peter Jordaan, Hester Oerlemans

Student portraits : Koen Kievits (except p. 11)

Photography : Hester Oerlemans (p. 4-7, 34), studioschuurman (p.3, installation view p. 4)

Basic layout and typography : Sinds 1416

Design : Oscar Lourens

Printing : Drukwerkdeal, Deventer

The DE.GROEN Fine Art Collection thanks the Gemeente Arnhem and Provincie Gelderland for their financial support.

Arnhem, April 2021

DE.GROEN Fine Art Collection

Weverstraat 40

6811 EM Arnhem

www.collectiedegroen.nl