Hans van Meeuwen “The Civilized World”

Storefront Ten Eyck

poster for Hans van Meeuwen “The Civilized World”

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Hans van Meeuwen presents artifacts of the familiar world in unfamiliar ways, often to disquieting effect. A room of the artist’s sculpture and drawings suggest a through-the-looking-glass world of gigantic animal heads and legs, tiny humans alongside huge pieces of furniture and odd combinations of architectural and natural elements. The resulting disorientation recalls dream imagery and Surrealism as well as the sly conceptualism of Charles Ray and Stephen Bahlkenhol. The work is intelligent, innocent and charming, rewarding extended viewing to fully engage its many metaphors and secrets.

The artist writes, “I wish to create images that remain in the mind – images, in the glut of what crosses before our eyes every day, which the observer will return to again and again. I seek to elicit moments of awareness in the flood of anonymity. My work may look curious at first sight, it get sometimes weird or frightening later on, and can be lovable when you think back to it afterwards. I want the observer to go through series of different emotions. I wish to appeal to the memories of the viewer. I seek to show just enough information to inspire the viewer’s own imagination. I want the viewer to fill in the artwork with his own memory, his own history. He will become personally involved with my work, as his own personal experience is evoked. We have an individual, personal remembrance (good and bad memories) on one side, as well as a common all together remembrance on the other side. Archetypes are those images we all have stored in us and we all have an emotional reaction to. I like to use those “in common” images in my work. I wish to investigate where these in-common aspects of the image turn into the personal story of the individual observer of the work. I wish to investigate where and when the overly known image of something will trigger the personal memories of the viewer and his/her own individual emotions.”

Hans van Meeuwen is a Dutch-born artist who moved to New York City in 2004. Prior to New York he lived and worked in Cologne, Germany for fourteen years. Van Meeuwen has had exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, Cologne, Bonn, the Netherlands, Belgium, and the Czech Republic. In 1987, he was finalist in the Prix de Rome prize in the Netherlands. He was selected for a booth for emerging artists on the Art Cologne Fair in 1996. Van Meeuwen had solo exhibitions at the Rheinische Landesmuseum in Bonn (2001) and the Kunsthalle Dominikanerkirche in Osnabrueck, Germany in 2007. On the occasion of both exhibitions catalogues were published. In addition to his sculptures and drawings, van Meeuwen has designed several permanent public artworks, such as a sculpture involving slowly illuminating and dimming raindrops, which was installed in the Netherlands in 2005. He had shows at Cristinerose Gallery the Durst Organization, or Mixed Greens, all in New York. His work was reviewed in Art in America, Sculpture Magazine (Insider), several German, Dutch and Belgian newspapers and WDR (West German television network) and SFB (Berlin television network).

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Schedule

from May 30, 2014 to June 29, 2014

Opening Reception on 2014-05-31 from 19:00 to 22:00

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