Painter's Painters Isa van Lier, Natacha Mankowski, Mirjam Vreeswijk

In Painter's Painters we present three painters who are exploring the medium and pushing its boundaries in different ways. Three artists known for inspiring other painters through their particular way of working: Isa van Lier, Natacha Mankowski and Mirjam Vreeswijk.

These young artists stand in the tradition of painting but use it in their non-conformist way of working. They know the technique so well that they can bend it to their will. For them, a frame is not a border or protection but part of the artwork. And they experiment with their own made paint and explore the boundaries with sculpture and architecture. They give us a glimpse of a new kind of painting.

Ophite

In Painter's Painters, Mankowski shows recent work from the Ophite series. The works are inspired by the Panormos marble quarry located on the Greek island of Tinos. The island is part of the Cyclades archipelago in the Aegean Sea. The landscape of Tinos is surreal and unusual - with giant boulders - hills and mountains of green marble. It is completely terraced with stone walls and walkways - connecting each village to its closest neighbours.

The ancient marble quarry Panormos is located in the far north of the island. The quarry opens to the sea like a giant green mouth. Seawater penetrates the bottom, creating an artificial lake in the middle. Travellers come to this forbidding and strange place to experience an 'otherworldly' environment. The green marble, which is mined by hand, is called verde antico - 'old green' in English or ophite. It is a serpentine - rich in magnesium and water - with a texture similar to that of a snake's skin - ranging from olive green to phthalo green.

Souvenirs

In her research on sites, Mankowski pays close attention to the geographical layout and the specific selection of raw materials on site. For this, she also delves into geology and volcanic studies. On location, she collects samples of raw materials, which she calls souvenirs. Back in her studio, she then uses these to make the thick impasto paint that structures and typifies her paintings.

Impasto

The impasto technique is characterised by the very thick application of paint. The way Mankowski applies the technique enables her to create spatial structures in her paintings, allowing them to enter the realm of sculpture. In this way, she defies the boundaries between different artistic disciplines.

A key inspiration in this way of working for Mankowski was Bram Bogart, who, like her, was interested in the material possibilities of painting. He started building with paint, giving his paintings a sculptural, three-dimensional presence. The disadvantage of the impasto technique is the long drying time; Bogart used the roof of his studio in Paris to dry his blocks of paint. Mankowski's canvases dry in her studio, which can take up to three months. The weight is also considerable, her canvases weigh up to 20 kilos.

Raw materials

As mentioned earlier, the Ophite painting series consists of a collection of souvenirs found in the ancient marble quarry Panormos. With these materials, Mankowski creates her paintings. They are found raw materials like pigment and marble sand, from which she makes her own blocks of paint with wax and oil. These end up on the canvas in various ways, sometimes directly, sometimes diluted, more similar to traditional paint. On these oil pastels as she calls them, she sticks small stones of green orphite marble. Because the medium is very workable, she uses a palette knife or her hands and feet to apply the paint.

The composition and way of painting or applying the souvenirs in the Ophite series is a special reference to the landscape of Tinos: the terrazzo and "architectural embroidery" found there in the famous dovecotes. These pigeon houses exist on all the Cycladic islands, but the most striking ones are found on this island. They are signs of ornamentation and aristocracy. They are considered ornaments of the landscape and are built from local materials - such as slate, whitewash and rocks. Stones are placed on them like jewels - to create rare decorations on surfaces of the structure - such as triangles, suns and cypresses. By applying small marble stones directly to the wet paint, Mankowski recalls part of this Greek folk tradition.

What is unique about Mankowski's paintings is that subject and material are the same. A landscape is painted with raw materials from the same landscape. Thus, she creates a harmony in her paintings that leads to the core of her story, the area where she has been.

Her world does not stop at the edges of the canvas, she tries to make it continue beyond. Some preceded her in this. Art brothers Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, in their better days together, were diligently looking for ways to make their paintings continue beyond the edges of the canvas. They began experimenting with painting on frames of their own design. Surrealists like Salvador Dalí and René Magritte also made the frame part of their work, for example a frame in the shape of a silhouette.

Kakejiku

Like Van Gogh and Gauguin, Van Lier looked closely at Chinese and Japanese painting and printmaking for her frames, such as the kakemono (hanging thing), or kakejiku (hanging scroll). These hanging scrolls are made from a roll of papyrus, silk, parchment or xuan paper (rice paper), which is painted on. This in turn is mounted on brocade of silk and wooden dowels. Inspired by this technique, Van Lier decided not to stretch her canvases, but to present them as a roll, with dowels at the top and bottom. By decorating the ends of the dowels with ceramics, she adds a new layer. As a result, sculptures carry the painting.

Her sculptures emerge from the world she creates. This has a universal imagery of shapes and colours, where time stands still and the intuitive inner world may be felt. She got the inspiration for this world during a stay in Japan. In particular, the country's kawaii culture fascinates her: a cuteness that is visible through all layers of society. Here she was also introduced to Shinto animism, which assumes that everything and every 'thing' has a soul. Adding faces to the forms in her work, she applies this philosophy herself. This can also be seen in the frames of the works in this exhibition.

Animated paintings

Her paintings also show these animated objects. These can be letters that come to life, as is the case in Japanese calligraphy. Her letters take on the personality of the imagined word or phrase, as in the painting ABC, believe in me. By adding shapes of letters, she also gives the viewer something to fall back on. The recognition of the letter brings the viewer back into the 'real' world. Van Lier likes to look for the space between forms and non-forms. She plays on the desire for recognition with this in-between space. Animated objects are also the subject in the painting Yin Yang, where various abstract forms combine to form a mysterious whole.

Flat and spatial

The placement of the shapes in the paintings has been carefully thought out to create a perfect harmony, as in the rock gardens so valued by Van Lier. They are flat compositions, as in traditional Japanese hanging scrolls. Van Lier embraces the two-dimensionality of the surface. The placement of the shapes in relation to each other emphasise this. By making ceramic figurines at the ends of the scrolls, van Lier creates a combination of flatness and spatiality and her dream world becomes physical again. In this way, she plays with the viewer's expectations and keeps him or her wondering.

Through the combination of painting and sculpture, playing with the edges of the canvas and combining different techniques, Van Lier experiments with the possibilities within painting. She is a master at taking her audience into her world by combining two- and three-dimensional, of what exists in the real world, or what is just an illusion on the canvas.

Collages

What makes Mirjam Vreeswijk's work special is that she brings all these techniques together. With this, she builds collages of painting techniques. Her paintings are also based on collages. Collages that she builds in her studio, from found objects such as mirrors, ribbons, jewellery, designer shoes and magazine clippings. While painting these collages, vistas of landscapes, nighttime deserted highways and reflections of glacial lakes emerge.

Thus, her paintings end up in the corner of surrealism. The surrealist movement, which existed roughly between 1924 - 1940, is characterised by shaping and making visible the subconscious and irrational. The mysterious and hallucinatory atmosphere in the artworks of Magritte, Dali and Miro, among others, has a disorienting effect on the viewer. Vreeswijk achieves the same kind of surreal feeling by combining surprising objects and shapes, and alternating between the recognisable and the alienating. She also uses tromp-l'oeil effects in the paint. In this way, she fuses reality and imagination, and you continue to look at her canvases with fascination.

Melancholy and mysticism

Vreeswijk finds stylistic inspiration in a variety of historical movements. From the lightness in the decorative elements of Rococo to the heaviness in the romantic works of William Blake. She admires Blake's atmosphere of melancholy and mysticism, which he reinforces through light-dark contrasts. Vreeswijk also finds the depiction of a mystical mood in the abstract work of artist Hilma af Klint fascinating. In particular, her swan series, in which she works with reflections of symbolic shapes and symmetry. In the work of Art Deco artist Tamara de Lempicka, she admires the elegant manner of material depiction.

Decors

For this exhibition, Vreeswijk created a series of paintings around sets from theatres and black-and-white films. In her paintings, she always plays with what is real or an illusion, and what has depth or is actually flat. In the painting Rebirth, for example, we see a butterfly, as a set piece on stage. The shape of the insect creates movement, as if it has the desire to fly away, which contrasts with the static nature of the set piece. Theatre scenery also fascinates Vreeswijk because it serves as the transition between reality and theatre. Fabric is one of the most difficult materials to paint, and therefore a challenge, something she loves. She has painted the folds of the canvas in Rebirth in such a way that it follows the shape of the butterfly's body and wings, creating another illusion of depth.

The green background in her recent canvases is reminiscent of old ghost films in black and white, such as Nosferatu and Dracula. In the perception and pictures of these films, a green haze comes over the film image, an atmosphere that appeals to Vreeswijk. She has enlarged this and applied it in the background of Rebirth. We also see this green background in the large painting Time To Pretend. Here, she has enhanced this ghostly feeling by using candles as a light source, giving the painting a great light-dark contrast. This chiaroscuro technique, made famous by Italian painter Caravaggio, creates a dramatic effect. The composition of the painting is built like a backdrop, where an hourglass shape with Celtic hearts provides symmetry and the candelabras provide the intimacy of a Victorian play.

Because of her unique mastery of technique, Vreeswijk interests a large group of painters who cannot help but admire her painting style during fairs and exhibitions with their noses pressed to the canvas. That is why she is a painter's painter, and was thus the inspiration for this exhibition.