The Place

Natasja van Kampen, Heidi Linck, Erik Pape

drawings, paintings

23 March – 13 April 2014

The Place. A location is able to make such a big impression that it triggers an artist to try and analyze why that particular place is so fascinating, attempting to get to the very heart of that attraction.
A location can evoke desire, but also fear. For centuries, paradise has been a subject in art. On the other side of the spectrum, Anselm Kiefer’s paintings of historical German locations are attempts to exorcise and deal with a sinister past.

Natasja van Kampen (1970) unites these two opposites in her drawing Het Paradijs als Restruimte (Paradise as a Residual Space), a three-dimensional world map on which the locations of all wars are marked. The place in which no conflict ever raged is where paradise is located. The gravity and scope of the wars define their height on the map. This is why there is a Mount Everest-sized mountain in Europe, on account of the First World War, and one of Matterhorn-ish proportions in the turbulent Middle East.

With Indian ink, Heidi Linck (1978) draws obscure interiors of buildings that have been abandoned, but still bear traces of the people that used them. Her series The Preparation Room shows rooms in a deserted hospital. Her video Ready to Lose Control is also shown: a registration of a deserted Second World War Luftwaffe living barracks near the former airfield Deelen in Holland.
Since the start of his long career Erik Pape’s (1942) has focused on Paris in his paintings, a city that to him embodies and fulfills the notion of artistic freedom. For the last fifteen years he depicts the Place Stalingrad, a busy square where the metro moves above ground over an arched railway flyover. By visiting the place every year, he has familiarized himself with it to such an extent that his representation could be regarded as internalized. The dynamics of the traffic and the feel of the square’s space are conveyed in pronounced, almost expressionistic colors. Erik Pape also shows a video in which he has tried to capture the essence of the square.