Things That Struck Me

Erik Pape

paintings, sketchbooks, video’s

5 September – 10 October 2021

Erik Pape (1942) has been fascinated by the city of Paris from the start of his long career. Successively he painted the banks of the Canal St. Martin and the round ponds in the Tuileries gardens, after which he painted well-known images such as Notre Dame, Gare du Nord, Sacré Coeur, to see if he could curb the cliché in them. After that period, the roundabout Place Stalingrad with its above-ground metro viaduct became his subject. From 2017 he starts the series Things that struck me in which he no longer depicts the architecture of the viaduct with its arches, but apparently insignificant things on and around the square.

These range from shoes, cooking utensils or vases in shop windows, the plat du jour in the bistro to a city clock, mattresses of clochards, signs and discarded furniture. Erik Pape isolates these images and sets them against a coloured background, which puts the banal and prosaic of urban space in a new light and re-enchants it. In his most recent works Erik Pape paints plants and flowers such as trout, vetch and yellow iris that he finds close to home and puts in a vase at home. This brings his own hometown of Delft after Paris into his paintings. The exhibition shows paintings from the past three years, together with sketchbooks and videos, material that Erik Pape made on the spot in Paris.