Bad Times – New Religion

Marie Civikov, Kim Hospers, Marjolijn van der Meij, Justin Wijers

paintings, drawings

19 october t/m 17 november 2013

In times of trouble and crisis man traditionally seeks comfort and guidance in religion. Presently ever more desperate people are driven into the arms of God. Finding guidelines to cope with the difficulties present day life poses seems almost impossible. Political and economical systems fail, science is unable to offer convincing solutions and fear, aggression and intolerance are stirred up as a result.

Central theme in the work of Kim Hopers (1982) is television, the medium that has influenced and determined our lives to such an extent that it has almost replaced religion. In series  of small drawings he tries to capture the essence of the endless stream of images that tv confronts us with constantly.

In Marie Civikov’s (1979) paintings traditional icons of power are questioned. For instance an image of God wearing Nike sneakers is superimposed by a computer error code text. Marjolijn van der Meij (1970) often deals with occultism and collectivism in her drawings. In a big drawing she mixes images of a Korean crowd worshipping a pig god with scenes of a socialist youth rally from the 1930’s.

In Justin Wijers’ (1981) work bad times are present in the form of traffic and war victims that he finds in the internet, which he meticulously depicts with a fine pen and embellishes with bright colours, miniatures and text, seducing us to look at them up close.