Festive start of the gallery season—with Amsterdam Art:
- Friday 8 September, 17:00-21:00 (Screening and short introduction on the hour)
- Saturday 9 September, 12:00-18:00 (Special opening hours)
TMH is pleased to present one of the most important Dutch artists, JCJ Vanderheyden (1928-2012). This is the first survey show of Vanderheyden in Amsterdam since his retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum in 2001. The show focuses on his famous checkerboards in black and white and in brilliant colors, paintings of airplane windows, reflections on art history, and signature horizons, worked out on canvas or with photography. The distinguished art writer and curator Rudi Fuchs praised Vanderheyden’s radical gestures: “He could paint, but what if he photographed that painting: […] was it another painting when he painted upon the photograph of the painting?” (Stedelijk Museum catalogue, 2001)
While interrogating the crossovers of science, society, and art in different mediums such as video, photography, digital sound, and installations, Vanderheyden would take up and abandon painting—creating, by way of these periodic reversals and moments of surrender to new mediums, some of the most radically post-minimal, post-painterly works. It is as though what mattered most was not to confront the world’s overextended infrastructures, but to invite us to contribute our own knowledge, to prompt us to enter into the technological flux in order to understand its direction and impact on life (and art).
—Marsha Plotnitsky
About the Artist
JCJ Vanderheyden (1928-2012, NL) is regarded as one of the most influential Dutch contemporary artists. His reputation as a painter who redefined painting while engaging with multimedia and science was already established in the late 1970s. Since his participation in documenta 7, 1982, in Kassel, Germany, Vanderheyden continued to be invited for solo and curated exhibitions in museums and galleries. He had surveys and retrospectives in major museums in the Netherlands, such as the Kunstmuseum Den Haag (Haags Gemeentemuseum at the time), 1967 and 1977, Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, 1983, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, 1990 and 2011, and Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 2001. Throughout his career, Vanderheyden played an important role in the Dutch art community, and his artworks and books continue to be highly regarded. Until his death in 2012, Vanderheyden lived and worked in his native city of Den Bosch, NL.
The show is organized in collaboration with gallerist and art historian Fred Wagemans. Texts by Marsha Plotnitsky.
