The Logic of Turbulence
Karin van Dam
Martin Fenne
dawings, spatial works, textile works
19 October – 17 November 2024
Over the past years Karin van Dam (1959) has shifted her focus from the urban environment to structures that are present in nature at a micro level. She already perceived the city as an organic entity that is constantly developing. With fellow artist Ed Pien (1958) she made several trips through Canada and recently spent a residency with him in Burnaby, British Columbia. The draining of a large local lake with the resulting fish deaths and impact on the residents inspired her for a series of drawings that will be on show at the gallery. In addition, a continuous frieze of drawings is presented in which cell structures are linked together. The shapes are comparable to mussel beds that develop on the coast in the dynamics of ebb and flow. As always, the drawings are expanded with spatial objects, balls wrapped with wool and circular knitted shapes in wool and synthetic materials that she develops in the Textiel Museum Tilburg, NL. With the drawings and their spatial additions, Karin van Dam switches from the large overarching urban structures to a micro level, to the building blocks of nature that she wants to make tangible.
Karin van Dam’s installation Spinning Up Spinning Down is on show at the Textiel Museum Tilburg.
Till June 15, 2025. TextielMuseum, Goirkestraat 96, Tilburg, see www.textielmuseum.nl
Since 2003 Martin Fenne (1964) has developed a very labor-intensive technique in which he sews satin piping together strip by strip. He makes sophisticated use of colour, bearing painters like Giotto and Piero della Francesca in mind who also use colour to vitalize and give volume to their human figures. Over the past two years, Fenne has been working on a new series in which he portrays the four natural elements. The floods in Limburg in the south of the Netherlands were the trigger for the series that implicitely also touches on the climate crisis. In the first work he depicts aquatic plants waving in the flow of a stream, fire is a dramatic forest fire with intense golden red flames that gnaw on black trunks. Earth is depicted as geological deposits in ochres and browns in which a large stone is lodged, air is rendered as a dynamic cloudy sky. With the four works Fenne also refers to the different realms and atmospheres in Dante’s Divine Commedia. They measure 78 x 140 cm and each have an equally large perspex container on the floor with left over cuts of the satin strips. The works on the wall thus get a completely random echo in the same material and colour.
Two textile works by Martin Fenne can be seen at Kunsthal Kade Amersfoort in the exhibition Sleep.
Till January 5, 2025. Kunsthal KAdE, Eemplein 77, Amersfoort, see: kunsthalkade.nl