Gedagtes Van Stof
A solo exhibition by Klara-Marié den Heijer
15.10.20 - 19.11.20
AVA Main Gallery
Gedagtes Van Stof, Klara-Marié den Heijer's first solo exhibition, walks us through the artist’s creative processes of making paint, organising ideas, and finally painting these onto primed surfaces.
Den Heijer explores the play between her inner world and the materials she uses when she paints. Her work touches on the exchange between mind and matter; matter as the physical substance of the visible world and mind as ephemeral human thoughts that are hidden within. We use matter as a material to give form to our thoughts. This allows us to develop them and extend them into the world. Conversely, by implementing our ideas we can also shape the physical world. A painting is a surface where material and thoughts entangle. Through this alchemical process, artists weave a bond between the mind of humans and the world of matter. In his book What painting is (1999:2-3) James Elkins writes that: To an artist, a picture is both a sum of ideas and a blurry memory of ‘pushing paint,’ breathing fumes, dripping oils and wiping brushes, smearing and diluting and mixing. Bleary preverbal thoughts are intermixed with namable concepts, figures and forms that are being represented.
Therefore a painting serves as an archive of materialised thoughts and conceptualised substances. The show includes three key parts: The first is an installation of colour swatches titled GRONDSTOF that serves as a reference for a collection of pigments made of raw material that was gathered from the places the artist traveled to. The second is INGEDAGTE an installation of tablets painted with oil paint made from these pigments. Like a system of index cards, these tablets are used to gather and organise thoughts. The third part is a body of paintings, mostly landscapes. In Imagining Landscapes (2012:16), Tim Ingold writes that landscape is not a unification of the dualistic opposites such as mind and matter but rather a flow between these two. These paintings emerge from the flow between the physical and mental material explored in GRONDSTOF and INGEDAGTE.
Sources: Elkins, J. 1999. What painting is. New York: Routledge. Ingold, T. 2012. Introduction, in Imagined landscapes. Edited by M. Janowski & T. Ingold. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing: 1-18.
Artist Biography
Klara-Marié den Heijer was born in Pretoria and grew up in Somerset-West, where she started to keep strange things in bottles under her bed. She took painting as a subject at Parel Vallei High School. She obtained her BAVA in Fine Arts (cum laude) at the nearby University of Stellenbosch, where she tried every possible art medium except for painting. Longing for adventure, she moved to South Korea for a few years, where she taught English, bought a camera, and took woodcarving lessons. She became homesick and moved back to South Africa, to Cape Town, where she worked at a printing company at day and painted at night. She realised there is more to know, and completed her MAVA in Fine Arts (cum laude) from the same university, where she focussed on oil painting and ended up gathering and grinding anything she can find into pigment. Her Masters exhibition was titled LIGGING and her thesis Minding Matter: reflecting and fixating on landscape painting. In 2017 she was accepted for an Art Residency 108 in New York and in 2018 she spent a month at a residency in France. Today she is settled in Stellenbosch, with her husband, and she works from her studio situated on Rustenberg Wine Estate.
To download the catalogue, click here
To download the price-list, click here