SHELTER DRESS
Fransje Killaars
installations, folding screen, paintings on paper
29-06 through 27-07-2025
after that open by appointment till 15 August
vernissage Sunday 29 June at 16:00 hours
Following the presentation of her monumental work All Colours are Free at BlowUp Art on the Lange Voorhout in The Hague, and her installation The Intuition at the Art Island fair, Fransje Killaars (1959) returns this summer with a solo exhibition at Galerie Maurits van de Laar.
Shelter Dress is the title of an earlier work in which Fransje Killaars puts a 1970s fashion dress, an objet trouvé, on a round pedestal draped with various camouflage fabrics, designed for and applied by the international military industry. Killaars has frequently worked with readymade textiles in her earlier practice, viewing them as carriers of cultural identity, lifestyle, and Zeitgeist, charged with implicit social and political meaning. Created in 2007 Shelter Dress gains a new relevance in view of today’s climate of crisis and conflict.
Unlike much of Killaars’ oeuvre, known for its vibrant, fluorescent colours, the works of Shelter Dress are designed in a more subdued, tone-on-tone palette. In Study for Caryatids (2007), she uses four different camouflage fabrics and a wooden cross as the foundation for a human figure dressed in a flamenco dress, which in turn balances a plank of cardboard.
In MAP (2008), she constructs an urban landscape from fabrics with patterns in black, white, and dark reds. A female figure sits at the edge of the scene watching, a quiet mediator who draws the viewer into the piece, just as the caryatids lend a human scale to Study for Caryatids. Also on view is a folding screen composed of horizontal strips in black, grey, and white patterns, what Killaars describes as both the beginning and the end of colour. In contrast a series of colourful acrylic paintings on paper are on show from the installation The Intuition in which a kneeling black and a white figure are connected by a brightly coloured band between them.
Colour is the central theme throughout Killaars’ body of work. With a background in painting, she has, since 1995, created spatial installations using brightly coloured textiles in which art touches upon design, architecture and fashion. From 1984 to 1994, she worked as an assistant to Sol LeWitt and, in 2011, collaborated with MVRDV architects on a proposal for the North Delegates’ Lounge at the United Nations headquarters in New York. In 2003 a textile installation of her was installed on the walls of the drawing room of the Catshuis, the official residence of the Prime Minister of the Netherlands.
