Revealing is an impressive group show as one may expect in grand old Nouvelles Images. Running right through the generations, it shows works by Toon Teeken (1944), Joost van den Toorn (1954), Omar Koubâa (1979) and guest artist Marie Civikov (1979).
Few Dutch painters have such a great mastery of applying such a rich diversity in colour, texture and meaning as Teeken has.
Necessarily only part of this can be seen in a group show, but what an examples they are!
On show are some portraits of great names, both concise and expressive, and a recent series of smaller but very rich paintings called Interaction.
Van den Toorn is another artist with an extremely rich visual language.
He is best known for his sculpture, often gifted with a great sense of humour that seems to touch the seriousness of his subjects without becoming killingly ironic.
In this exhibition he shows an enormous series of ceramic plates and saucers with portraits of figures of national and / or international fame.
Koubâa is an artist who uses paint as a trigger for his great imagination.
In the exhibition he shows collages and paintings.
In his works, especially the bigger ones, it is not just worthwhile wandering through all the details but also to focus in and out, as each one is a cosmos with a constellation of its own.
His abstractions are not technical ones but seem to be ways to find common ground with the abstract idea of the world itself.
Civikov is digging into her personal family history and as such in European history, but her work is much more than that.
Different modern and postmodern concepts and ways of seeing are used, from abstraction and surrealism to her very personal and almost painfully clear use of colour and light.
Her figures are extremely crisp and clear as if they try to cling to memory without allowing it to become sentimental.
[Click on the pictures to enlarge]
©Villa Next Door 2017
Content of all phjotographs courtesy to the artists and to Galerie Nouvelles Images, Den Haag.
Bertus Pieters
Villa Next Door 