Continuing the series Dialogues with Nature III, Galerie Fontana is pleased to present the works of Claudy Jongstra, Ruud van Empel and the artist duo Feipel & Bechameil at Art Antwerp 2024.
Claudy Jongstra’s Silenced and Northern Treasure (2024) series is an urgent call for awareness to protect and conserve our ecosystem. The necessary fortification and resilience of the biotic community from which these pieces derive are manifest in these tapestries. Claudy operates from a self-sufficient studio and has a sustainable, no-waste working process Silenced 2/2 and Silenced 2/3 pieces were previewed during Atmosphaera, a well-received show at the gallery from September – November.
For Dialogues with Nature III, Feipel & Bechameil continued the series ‘Shelters’, small ceramic sculptures as well as functional birdhouses. Through vivid colors of the glaze and through their partly geometric and sometimes organic shapes, these sculptures evoke joyful characters. The artits started to develop the birdhouses with the project ‘Cité d’urgences – Apus Apus’ and gave been awarded in 2018 the special price of the Jury from the COAL award in collaboration with the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris. The birdhouses are dedicated to the species whose survival is directly endangered by the scarcity of their habitat due to our modern lifestyle. The birdhouses aim to offer a new form of housing for the birds and hope to help re-integrated them within our living space and to allow a poetic co-habitation of mankind and other forms of nature.
In van Empel’s Floresta series, photographic assemblages lean into the notion of authorship and realism, as the artist explores a mastery of the ecological space through digital and analogue manipulation. Lush detailing, created by the artist, draws the viewer into vast imagined landscapes. Selecting examples from a plethora of images amassed by the artist, van Empel is a purist in his application of photomontage considering that his layering and combining of images do not subscribe to any morphing techniques. Subtle image manipulations are applied to subjects which result in a great psychological effect, thus showing an incredible imagination in his detail-orientated masterpieces.
Made possible by financial support from the Mondriaan Fund
