Glass panelled façade, Casuariestraat.
Originally built in the 1980s, the building soon became uninteresting and obsolete.
In 2011 it was restored by Fokkema Architects and the glass panels were added giving the building a fresh, new start.
The glass panels reflect the Ministry of Finance.
[Click on the pictures to enlarge]
© Villa Next Door 2017
All pictures were made in March 2017.
Bertus Pieters
Peter Feiler’s (1981) present show at Hoorn & Reniers isn’t for the faint hearted, but then life itself isn’t for the faint hearted either.
In our age of consumerism a curtain of fun and efficiency hides a world of control and power struggle, relentless, fanatic, cruel and both mediagenic and secretive.
It is a kind of merry-go-round no one of us seems to be able to quit from.
Feiler’s works may remind you of Jheronimus Bosch’s demonic paintings.
In Bosch’s works redemption seems hardly possible for humanity.
Both Bosch and Feiler show a fully corrupted society whose evil can hardly be avoided.
In Bosch’s late Gothic society all-pervasive, corrupt religious and worldly powers brought a new Renaissance world of new knowledge but also of new and more relentless ways of war and cruelty.
However Bosch always implicitly shows that there is an alternative.
In Feiler’s works that is not quite so sure.
Bosch shows you how not to behave, while Feiler just shows his visions and leaves it to you how to deal with them.
His protagonists come from the world of advertising, porn, comics, games, showbiz etc.
A world which seems to have replaced the ‘real’ world.
The title of his show implicitly asks you the question, is it pure decadence to enjoy his works and what are you really enjoying then?
[Click on the pictures to enlarge]
© Villa Next Door 2017
Content of all photographs courtesy to Peter Feiler and Hoorn & Reniers, Den Haag
Bertus Pieters
Olphaert den Otter
Notoriously, composer Karlheinz Stockhausen said about the 9/11 Attacks: Well, what happened there is, of course (….) the biggest work of art there has ever been.
Marjolijn van der Meij
By that time – it was a few days after the traumatising acts of terror – this caused controversy.
Tobias Lengkeek
Martin Gabriel
On the other hand the English are their cruel king Henry VIII still grateful for turning their gothic abbeys into romantic ruins.
Olphaert den Otter
Marjolijn van der Meij
Destruction can be horrible and may be cruel, but undeniably it also produces visions of transformation, and that has its own aesthetics.
Tobias Lengkeek
Martin Gabriel
Works by four artists who occupy themselves in one way or another with change and the passing of time are presently on show at Maurits van de Laar Gallery.
Olphaert den Otter
Marjolijn van der Meij
Olphaert den Otter (1955) shows places of destruction in his series World Stress Paintings.
Tobias Lengkeek
Martin Gabriel
The delicateness and smallness of his tempera paintings form a stark contrast to the manmade catastrophes he actually shows.
Olphaert den Otter
Marjolijn van der Meij
Marjolijn van der Meij (1970) deforms her works by crumpling them and reworking them.
Tobias Lengkeek
Martin Gabriel
Again, the cruelty of the act becomes a base for an extremely delicate way of sculpture that catches light and dark and gives new content to what is actually shown.
Olphaert den Otter
Marjolijn van der Meij
Tobias Lengkeek (1991) is looking for the aesthetics of what you may call slow destruction, the decay you may meet with at any moment of the day in any place around you.
Tobias Lengkeek
Martin Gabriel
These moments and places and the transition they represent are the base for his very painterly paintings.
Olphaert den Otter
Marjolijn van der Meij
The slow but momentous visions of destruction inspire his aesthetics, even to the point where you can see the destruction in the paintings themselves.
Tobias Lengkeek
Martin Gabriel
Martin Gabriel (1991) is probably the least destructive in his works.
Olphaert den Otter
Marjolijn van der Meij
He combines painting, collage and the language of computer games in his works.
Tobias Lengkeek
Martin Gabriel
He digitises and de-digitises, dragging the venerable art of painting into the digital maelstrom of the contemporary and redefining real and digital time and space.
Olphaert den Otter
Marjolijn van der Meij
All four artists are trying to find a way of living with sometimes horrific, sometimes sneaking changes in our lives and to redefine aesthetics in the process.
Tobias Lengkeek
It makes for an interesting and fine show in which works by two ‘older’ artists are confronted with those of a younger generation.
Martin Gabriel
[Click on the pictures to enlarge]
© Villa Next Door 2017
Content of all pictures courtesy to the artists and Galerie Maurits van de Laar, Den Haag
Bertus Pieters
As it happened, i entered GEM to see Maaike Schoorel’s (1973) show together with a couple.
The man walked around for a few seconds, came back to his lady and said it’s all empty spaces, there’s really nothing to be seen in these paintings.
The lady smiled at me understandingly and said well, somebody has to paint that too and they left the exhibition.
Maybe painting just wasn’t the couple’s cup of tea.
On the other hand it also shows what is going on in Schoorel’s paintings.
She makes abstractions of common themes like interiors, still lifes, portraits etc, usually based on photographs.
Her ways of abstraction are purely intuitive.
She minimalises the information, but not in a minimalist way.
Whether you recognise the picture or not isn’t really important.
In a way they all look like moments of just awakening, the moment you start looking, but still not realising what you really see.
Or they are like loud music heard from far.
When making pictures of these paintings i realised that photographs won’t give you any idea of them.
That is my regular conclusion, but with Schoorel’s work this is all the more true.
I am a great admirer of these works, but Schoorel’s way of painting may also become a kind of mannerism.
[Click on the pictures to enlarge]
© Villa Next Door 2017
Content of all pictures courtesy to Maaike Schoorel and GEM, Den Haag
Bertus Pieters
Den Haag Centraal (The Hague Central Station) seems to be one of the least loved of The Hague’s modern buildings.
Designed by Koen van der Gaast (1923 – 1993) – responsible for many post-WWII railway stations – and built in 1970-1976 to replace an older station and as part of the re-planning and modernisation of the city centre, it seems to have lost its once modernist appeal.
It was brutally stripped of its shelter roof over its main entrance under its concrete façade and moreover, some new postmodern high rise buildings will be placed in the square in front of its mighty gable.
Breaking it down was probably not possible, so other measures were taken to punish it for its radical brutalist appearance.
It is already crowned with rubbish as if it is just a huge outlet store.
Whatever the qualities of the new buildings in the square (and i have my doubts about that), its present and future position can only be explained to a foreigner while blushing with shame.
Not particularly having been a fan of the building, but making pictures of it last March, i came to value its crude modern shape.
Den Haag Centraal is a terminus and it really looks like a buffer stop.
Its eleven horizontal stories look out over the square and the greens of Koekamp (a deer camp) and Malieveld (a historic field, traditionally used for fairs and demonstrations) and its more or less identical back façade looks out over the railways.
Its monumental sculptural qualities, brutalist and functional though they are, are quite impressive.
It has lost its function as a symbolic buffer stop as with recent renovations it has got more main entrances on other sides.
Last decades the façade has become a brooding brownish building, a muttering old lady, ignored by everyone.
The station hall has recently been revamped as a roofed market square by Benthem and Crouwel architects, as railway stations have to earn money these days, don’t ask me why.
They didn’t do a bad job at all but it makes the 1970s building all the more obsolete.
Its height and monumentality have no symbolic function anymore.
The new hall is a kind of big glass box which gives more light and elegance to the concrete environment.
However the environment itself doesn’t really co-operate.
The south Rijnstraat side of the building is a kind of windy and grey public space full of transport, constantly under construction and completely lost for humanity.
The bus platform on the east side will be restored soon, which is the least they can do.
The whole area looks like a failed exquisite corpse, a limbo before your journey.
Anything additional will make it worse.
[Click on the pictures to enlarge]
© Villa Next Door 2017
All pictures were taken in March 2017
Bertus Pieters
In its basement The Hague Museum for Photography shows works by Bieke Depoorter (1986) from her recent collection As it may be.
Depoorter tried to look behind the front doors of Egyptians to give a more intimate view of Egyptian daily life.
They have become delicate, sensitive and very rich pictures of a daily world that is unknown to outsiders.
During a later visit she has asked Egyptians to write their reactions about the photographs in the pictures themselves.
That is an interesting turn in what would otherwise be a more or less exotic, ethnographic series, rich in detail and beautiful as it is.
[Click on the pictures to enlarge]
© Villa Next Door 2017
Contents of all photographs courtesy to Bieke Depoorter and The Hague Museum for Photography
Bertus Pieters
Since the 1960s Western Europe is living in the age of consumerism which is now our all pervading way of life.
To maintain or build an identity has become something for the market as well.
You might be mistaken that identity is a matter of religion, nationality, ethnicity or whatever.
Forget it, identities are simply bought these days, they are trade.
That is most obvious in your clothing.
Observing people’s struggle to have an identity due to or in spite of the market has been and still is Hans Eijkelboom’s (1949) main subject as a photographer.
The Museum of Photography shows a retrospective of his work.
There are his early projects where he often plays a role himself in front of the camera, while his later sequences where he compares people wearing the same kind of cloths are also extensively present.
Eijkelboom doesn’t judge his subjects, he just observes them and seems to be constantly amazed by the commonness of his fellow human beings and the way they try to escape that commonness.
There is a dry but not wry sense of humour in his works.
Everybody who is interested in how we look alike and how we don’t in our public lives – as i do – should see this.
[Click on the pictures to enlarge]
©Villa Next Door 2017
Content of all photographs courtesy to Hans Eijkelboom and The Hague Museum of Photography.
Bertus Pieters
Inez Smit
Galerie Helder shows paintings by two artists, Inez Smit (1967) and Marena Seeling (1953), who make abstract work.
Inez Smit
Inez Smit
Inez Smit
While works of both artists go very well together, the show is also a dialogue of differences.
Inez Smit
Marena Seeling
Marena Seeling
Seeling’s work derives from vast polder landscapes, abstracted until only its light and space remain, even in the smallest works.
Marena Seeling
Marena Seeling
Marena Seeling
In Smit’s works space seems to be rediscovered in non-objective compositions.
Inez Smit
Inez Smit
It is a modest exhibition, but it has a lot of perspectives to offer.
Inez Smit
[Click on the pictures to enlarge]
©Villa Next Door 2017
Content of all photographs courtesy to the artists and Galerie Helder, Den Haag
Bertus Pieters
Villa Next Door 