MAARTEN VROLIJK
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Todd Merrill & Associates, Inc.
80 Lafayette Street New York, NY 10013
www.toddmerrillstudio.com
Printed in the United States of America
Catalog Design: Dallas Dunn
MAARTEN VROLIJK
Amsterdam-based artist and designer Maarten Vrolijk believes that art should make people’s everyday lives more beautiful through the many little details that evoke the unexpected. While strongly influenced by the natural world, Vrolijk is not on a quest to present an imitation of the “real” world, but rather, an exploration of the simple, unequivocal, and often overlooked aspects: color, form, delicacy, strength, transparency, ephemerality that provide a map to the fascinations we gravitate to when experiencing the world around us.
Working across a myriad of fine art and craft disciplines, his mixed media practice is remarkable for its consistency and fluidity. A steady line can be drawn throughout his body of work. His paintings inform his ceramics, which in turn are reflected in his textiles. The composition of his textiles is laid out with the same meticulous planning as his glass vessels. Though mostly abstracted, his subject has been primarily focused on flowers and other flora. Sometimes expressive, as in his paintings, or distinctly graphic, as in his ceramics, Vrolijk explains, “To my mind, flowers are nature’s gems and have long been a recurrent inspiration in my designs: the bold tulip, the sculpted rose, the delicate lily.”
Vrolijk is perhaps best known for glass vessels with their outgrowth of colored glass fragments. The volatility in accomplishing the exceptional thickness of his vases creates a risky balance between strength and delicacy. The thermal stress caused when trying to equalize the interior and exterior temperature of the cooling vessels, is fraught with the threat of breakage. The success of these pieces lies in
the crystalline clarity posed against their substantial physical impact. To create each piece, a meticulously patterned bed of broken glass pieces is strategically laid down and heated to a specific temperature in order to be properly fused to a nascent blown glass form. The temperature and timing must be precisely in tandem. It is a high-stakes process that results in a kind of frozen sense of chaos.
Similarly, his bombastic ceramic vessels have a particular aliveness as a result of Vrolijk’s mastery of impulse and intuition. Heavily scored and expressively painted, each has a particular personality that is, at once, playful and defiant. The same can be said of his works on canvas with their energetic application and heavy impasto.
Vrolijk’s greatest success, whether in glass, fiber, paint, or ceramic, is the organic nature that he maintains throughout each work. Each form has an eccentricity achievable only by the hand of the artist. The jewel-toned fragments appearing like colorful melting ice on his glass vessels, and the otherworldly plant-like protrusions seemingly attaching themselves to or growing out of the ceramic vases, give way to an energetic rapture.
His works have been collected and exhibited in several renowned international museums including the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Groninger Museum. Todd Merrill Studio is pleased to be the exclusive representative for Vrolijk’s work in the Americas.
-Dallas Dunn
Glass
13.78h x 12.60w x 12.99d in / 35h x 32w x 33d cm
Sakura TRP19022, 2019
Sakura 18002, 2018 Glass
18h x 13.50w x 12.50d in / 45.72h x 34.29w x 31.75d cm
Sakura TRP18003, 2018 Glass
19h x 12.50w x 13.50d in / 48.26h x 31.75w x 34.29d cm
Sakura TRP 22006, 2022
Glass
20.87h x 18.50w x 18.90d in / 53h x 47w x 48d cm
14.17h
10.63w
10.63d
36h
Sakura TRP23009, 2023 Glass
x
x
in /
x 27w x 27d cm
Sakura TRP 16013, 2016
Glass
18.90h x 14.17w x 14.57d in / 48h x 36w x 37d cm
Sakura TRP 16013, 2016
Glass
18.90h x 14.17w x 14.57d in / 48h x 36w x 37d cm
Sakura TRP20012, 2020
Glass
16.54h x 15.35w x 15.35d in / 42h x 39w x 39d cm
Glass 12.99h x 11.81w x 12.20d in / 33h x 30w x 31d cm
Sakura TRP23008, 2023
Sakura TRP22019, 2022 Glass 23.62h x 12.99w x 12.99d in / 60h x 33w x 33d cm
Glass 13.78h x 11.81w x 12.60d in / 35h x 30w x 32d cm
Sakura TRP23011, 2023
Ceramic with glaze
22h x 12w in / 55.88h x 30.48w cm
Overgrown III, 2021
17.5h x 21.5w x 17.5d in / 45h x 54.6w x 45d cm
Blooming Terra 21004, 2021
Ceramic with glaze
Blooming Terra 21006, 2021
Ceramic with glaze
19h x 19w x 19d in / 48h x 48w x 48d cm
Ceramic with glaze
28.50h x 12w in / 72.39h x 30.48w cm
Overgrown I, 2021
Ceramic with glaze
18h x 12w in / 55.88h x 30.48w cm
Overgrown II, 2021
Blooming
Ceramic with glaze, acylic paint on linen shade
33.86h x 21.65w in / 86h x 55w cm
Terra MVC 21009, 2021
Ceramic with glaze, linen shade
38.58h x 21.65w x 21.65d in / 98h x 55w x 55d cm
Blooming Terra MVC 21008, 2021
Blooming Terra MVC 22003, 2022
Ceramic with glaze, linen shade
36.61h x 21.65w x 21.65d in / 93h x 55w x 55d cm
Blooming Terra, 2020 wool, linen, eucalyptus 86.61h x 72.83w in / 220h x 185w cm
Oil on canvas
37.50h x 37.50w in / 95.25h x 95.25w cm
Helleborus, 2021
Purple Thistle, 2021
Oil on canvas
37.50h x 37.50w in / 95.25h x 95.25w cm
oil on canvas
50h x 50w in / 127h x 127w cm
Salon et Jardin, 2021
Todd Merrill Studio
Todd Merrill Studio represents an international group of established and emerging artists, each with a singular artistic vision and unprecedented point of view. In creating unique works of collectible design, each artist takes a hands-on approach that intersects contemporary design, fine art, traditional craft techniques, and pioneering innovation.
Individually, through meticulous craftsmanship and rigorous studio experimentation, each has developed leading-edge, proprietary methods that break previously set inherent limitations of conventional materials like wood, metal, plaster, concrete, ceramics, glass, and resin. Their intimate studio approach fosters an atmosphere of creativity where the work rendered significantly bears the hand of the artist.
Collectively the artists are helping to create a new visual vocabulary that advances long-held, established artistic boundaries. Their dynamic, one-of-a-kind, and frequently groundbreaking works contribute to today’s increasingly relevant grey space between art and design.
With the gallery’s support, the artists’ works have entered the collections of major private and public patrons and prestigious museums including the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum in New York; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; the Museum of Art and Design in New York; the High Museum in Atlanta; the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; the Carnegie Museum of Art in Philadelphia, the Houston Museum of Fine Art, and the Brooklyn Museum in New York.
In 2000, Todd Merrill opened Todd Merrill Antiques which quickly became renowned for its glamorous and eclectic mix of twentieth-century furniture and lighting. The pioneering gallery was one of the of the first to promote modernist and postmodernist American studio artisans including Paul Evans, Phillip Lloyd Powell, George Nakashima, Karl Springer, James Mont, Tommi Parzinger, among others.
In 2008, Rizzoli published Merrill’s “Modern Americana: Studio Furniture from High Craft to High Glam”, the first ever authoritative examination of the great studio furniture makers and designers who, from 1940 thru the 1990s defined American high style. To celebrate the tenth anniversary, in 2018 Rizzoli published an expanded edition, adding 60 pages to his original book. This survey of the period continues with two massive additional chapters focused on Women Makers and Showrooms.
After the publication of Modern Americana in 2008, Merrill began to shift the mission of the gallery and started the Studio Contemporary program which has today become his primary focus.
