m.simons proudly presents CURVES, Jan van der Ploeg’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.The artist enjoys international acclaim and his murals adorn many venues. In the current year alone, Van der Ploeg has painted walls in Arnhem, Nijmegen, Middelburg, Frankfurt, Lyon, Basel, Dallas, Auckland, Sydney and the Schneider Museum of Art in Oregon.
His oeuvre is in keeping with the Dutch abstract geometric tradition. Amid the lineage of artists from Mondrian and Van Doesburg onwards, Van der Ploeg stands out as a distinct colourist. While sticking to clear forms and lines akin to his predecessors, his colour palette seems inexhaustible.
For the exhibition CURVES, Van der Ploeg designed a new mural, which is displayed alongside recent works on canvas and paper. The mural responds to the architecture of the gallery, dividing it into four equal parts, alternating blocks of colour with the visible white of the wall. The mural acts as a backdrop for the works on canvas and paper, integrating them into a cohesive installation. This juxtaposition illustrates the difference in the artist’s different ways of creating. In the mural, the immediately surrounding architecture plays a central role, while the choices in works on paper and canvas seem less definitive and give Van der Ploeg space to revisit motifs and develop new forms.The new series of works on paper and canvas mainly consists of a combination of a colour with white or black. Compositions consist of narrow horizontal and vertical lines intersected by successive series of lines. Where these lines reach the limits of their medium, they seem to extend into the artist’s abstract universe.
Rosalind Krauss delved into the endless debates surrounding Mondrian’s centrifugal or centripetal nature of art in “Grids”: “Is what we see in a given painting just part of an implied continuity, or is the painting structured as an autonomous, organic whole?” When we ask this question in relation to Van der Ploeg’s work, an intriguing evolution becomes apparent. A centripetal nature prevailed in his earlier works; shapes were almost always contained in a composition, whether they were circles, rectangles or his famous “handles”.
Although the forms expanded earlier, it was more as repetition than as independent entities.In his current exhibition at Foundation IK in Middelburg, however, a shift is visible. For each exhibition, the IK Foundation asks a prominent artist to reflect on an important work within his oeuvre. Van der Ploeg responded with a mural featuring his “Grips” motif, deliberately truncated. The rounded rectangles are painted vertically on the wall, giving the impression that they extend below the floor and above the ceiling. This departure is echoed in the canvases and works on paper in the current exhibition, where independent forms bend centrifugally, cutting off at the edge of the canvas as if winding through the exhibition space.
