artists

In the work of Martin Assig (1959) a combination of sensuality and spirituality is always felt. The centre of attention in this is the human body: as a classical fertility goddess with numerous breasts, but also as a fragile house of the soul. A frequently occurring motif is the skirt, continuing as far as the breasts and cut off at shoulder level with a horizontal bar.

The drawings of Frank van den Broeck (1950) in charcoal and pastel are immediately recognizable by their characteristic handwriting. The representations often have something mysterious, they seem to convey a state of half consciousness in which a transparent but penetrating image suddenly presents itself.

Robbie Cornelissen (1954) draws complex architecture, baroque portraits and almost abstract representations. In all ‘genres' the artist's passion is striking: without exception the representations are highly detailed and drawn with great intensity.

Marcel van Eeden's date of birth 1965 is crucial in his oeuvre. All representations drawn by him are derived from the time before his birth. This implies that he works after existing visual material found in old magazines, books or newspapers. The subjects vary from sober fifties' interiors, cartoons, fires, to abstract patterns or texts. By copying these pictures Marcel van Eeden takes control, as it were, of a period of time he did not experience himself; he literally bends it to his will.

 At first sight the drawings of Paul van der Eerden (1954) are raw and uncomfortable. Often the image is completely flat and the representation has been squeezed into the framework of the sheet of paper. Grotesquely stylized faces almost burst from the surface, sometimes the representation has been deliberately cut off, so that it seems to run on beyond the surface of the drawing.

Dieter Mammel (1965) uses a special technique in his paintings. He paints with ink on raw canvas which is made wet, so that the colour runs out and branches whimsically. One can see clearly that the images have been painted from photographic examples. First, he used pictures from his own family album, which he later expanded with more general pictures from the 50's and 60's.

Taiwanese Canadian artist Ed Pien (1958) expresses deep human fears in his work. Grotesque creatures are cropping up in his drawings; demons, spirits and ghosts. Thus he continues an age-old tradition in Western and Asian art, the representation of hell.

Zeger Reyers (1966) is known for his installations in which he confronts the artificial, man-made world with nature. For instance, he made fungi grow from furniture and sank chairs down into the river Oosterschelde until they were overgrown with mussels. In the work ‘Drumstel' (drum set) (2004) he coupled up a hundred empty oil drums and placed them in the sea. The tangle of oil drums thus became an instrument played on by the sea, producing muffled, banging sounds. At the same time it showed the enormous power of the sea: after seven weeks the drums had been dented and rusted almost beyond recognition.

Johan Tahon's (1965) work focuses on the human figure, often represented as an elongated, fragile form. Until recently Tahon worked only in plaster, which he cut into the desired shape with an axe after the material had set. The process of building up and reworking is highly instinctive and intuitive, expressed in the searching, vulnerable quality of his human figures. Another aspect always felt is a sense of man's insignificance in relation to the universe, or man's imperfection in relation to the divine, by which Tahon expresses a basic pursuit of spirituality. Since a year Johan Tahon also works in ceramics, which he covers with white glaze.

The Austrian artist Elmar Trenkwalder (1959) evokes a baroque world in his drawings, in which a peculiar fusion of eroticism and architecture is taking place. In his richly decorated architectonic spaces columns have phallic forms, ornaments turn out to be composed of entwined human figures.

Justin Wijers (1981) draws victims of violence and traffic accidents he finds on the Internet. With a fine jellyroller pen he depicts the battered bodies in thin, precise lines. The bodies are only partly coloured in and their contours are very lightly sketched on the white surface of the paper, at first sight they look like abstract areas of colour or islands on a map in a white sea.