A VISION FOREVER FRESH

Herman Bossert, City Centre, pen and watercolour on paper, 20 x 50 cm (Courtesy Galerie Hamer, Amsterdam)

A Vision Forever Fresh

Last Works from Nico van der Endt's Galerie Hamer

In a previous post (24 January, 2024) I published some installations photographs of this exhibition at Galerie Atelier Herenplaats in Rotterdam, together with the original English language version of the introduction I wrote for the cahier produced by the gallery. Below I reproduce the cahier in full (text in Dutch). Printed copies are available to buy from the gallery.

A Vision Forever Fresh

Last Works from Nico van der Endt's Galerie Hamer

Galerie Atelier Herenplaats, Rotterdam. 19 January - 6 April 2024

An exhibition I curated, with significant input from Richard Bennaars and Stijn Kemper just opened in Rotterdam. 43 works are on show, drawn from an international pool, with work from the following artists: Herman Bossert (NL), Yalcin Cihangir (TR), Damian Valdes Dilla (CU), Philippe Eichenn (FR), Willem van Genk (NL), Elisabeth Gevaert (NL), Michael Hall (DE), Josvedi Jove-Junco (CU), Davood Koochaki (IR), Ron Roboxo (NL), Joseph Vignes (FR), Bertho Virant (BE), Roy Wenzel (NL), Willem Westbroek (NL), Scottie Wilson (UK). All the work was chosen from the remaining stock of the now-closed Galerie Hamer, Amsterdam. The idea was to celebrate the achievement of the gallery and its Director, Nico van der Endt. Rather than producing a retrospective exhibition, with examples of artists shown throughout the gallery's history, I decided to assemble a show that felt like it could have been Galerie Hamer's next one; the work in the stockroom was, after all, strong, fresh and lent itself to coherent themes of the architecture and life of the city, the human figure, and the creation of visionary worlds.

The Galerie Atelier Herenplaats produced a 20 page catalogue, for which I wrote a short Introduction that was translated into Dutch by Stijn Kemper. In this post I reproduce the English language original of my text, below, together with some installation photographs of the exhibition, including a couple from the opening on 19 January.

When Galerie Hamer closed its doors for the last time in 2023 a hole was torn in the fabric of the Dutch art world. For 54 years Hamer provided a shop window for the kind of exciting new art that no other Dutch commercial gallery specialised in; uniquely idiosyncratic work produced away from the dominant art world, and mostly ignored by it. Throughout that time its Director, Nico van der Endt demonstrated an unwaveringly good eye for the best of this art from elsewhere, often discovering new artists and introducing to The Netherlands many that were already known a little in other places, from Nikifor, Scottie Wilson, and Davood Koochaki, to Willem van Genk, Roy Wenzel, and Yalcin Chihangir. Precisely because of its unique focus, Hamer also made important contributions to the discourse of contemporary art and culture in the Netherlands, creating a space in which ideas about naïve art, art brut, and outsider art could be introduced and discussed. Indeed, Van der Endt introduced the term outsider art to Holland in the 1980s, after reading the late Roger Cardinal’s eponymous, seminal text on the subject. Van der Endt was central to plans for a Dutch Museum for Naïve Art in the late 1980s, which had a brief, but extremely important flowering as the Stadshof Museum Voor Naïeve Kunst En Outsider Art, in Zwolle. Though the museum is gone, the collection is currently safe, on long loan to the Museum Dr Guislain, in Ghent, Belgium.

Installation view of A Vision Forever Fresh, including work by Davood Koochaki, Yalcin Cihangir, Bertho Virant, Joseph Vignes, and Roy Wenzel

Hamer consistently showed and championed artists overlooked by the mainstream artworld, although some of them have since become very well-known in that context, in particular Nikifor, Anna Zemánková, and Van Genk. Others, such as Koochaki, Michel Nedjar, and August Walla are now canon-ical figures in the global specialised field of outsider art. From the start, Van der Endt’s vision and scope was international, extending to countries such as Iran, Turkey and Cuba, as well as Eastern European before they opened up again to the West. Crucially, Van der Endt also had a keen interest in homegrown artists, championing among others, Jaco Kranendonk, Herman Bossert, Roboxo, Bertho Virant, Wenzel, and of course, Van Genk.

Installation view, with works by Herman Bossert (left) and Damian Valdes Dilla (right)

It is a testament to Van der Endt’s undimmed enthusiasm and eye for new developments in the field that he continued to bring new artists and work to public attention right to the end, including Yalcin and, finally, Ward van Grimbergen. In a gallery that had been committed almost exclusively to drawing and painting over half a century, it is also worthy of note that one of the last exhibitions at Hamer was dev-oted to the remarkable, relatively recently rediscovered photographs of Marcel Bascoulard.

Installation view with works by Davood Koochaki

Van der Endt’s support for his artists based in the Netherlands often went beyond the usual friendly business relationships one might expect of a dealer. Artists unused to, or unconnected with the art world, often also have additional support needs, and precisely because he was interested in them as people, as well as artists, Van der Endt was busy with the everyday lives of many of them, often finding himself advocating for their social welfare with authorities, and assisting them and their families, sometimes even financially. This was especially so in the cases of Van Genk, and for a while, Ognjen Jeremic (Ogi) and Aldo Piromalli, as well as Wenzel’s brother and sister-in-law, who are his primary carers.

Installation view with works by Elisabeth Gevaert and Roy Wenzel

Since the activities of Galerie Hamer were intimately interwoven with the interests and tastes of Van der Endt, it is unsurprising that in retrospect certain common themes and subjects come into focus over the years. The image of the city and urban life is one of these, recurrent in richly different ways, in the current exhibition, in work by Wenzel, Bossert, Elisabeth Gevaert, and Damian Valdes Dilla. The human figure is also central, always interpreted in distinctly powerful psychological ways, by Wenzel, Virant, and Michael Hall. At times such figures metamorphose into animals and hybrid zoomorphs, as in work here by Koochaki and Yalcin. Another important trope at Hamer was the tendency toward abstraction among many of its artists, most often in intense, colourful arabesques, represented here by Yalcin, Roboxo, and even Virant.

Installation view with works by Herman Bossert

‘A Vision Forever Fresh’ is a celebration of Van der Endt’s huge contribution to the Dutch art scene, and offers a chance to experience in Rotterdam a Galerie Hamer redux, a year after it closed its doors in Amsterdam for the last time. Rather than attempt a historical retrospective of Hamer exhibitions over five decades, it is made with work chosen from the gallery’s stock after closure. It is remarkable that there was very little ‘old’ work in the stockroom, and even more so that there was almost nothing of leftover low-quality work rejected from past shows. On the contrary, the stockroom still had the feel of work in progress – work by artists Van der Endt was currently working with and art waiting to be returned after recent exhibitions. In this sense, this exhibition demonstrates that no dimming of vision and inquisitiveness ever took place. It also demonstrates the possibility of continuance of the Galerie Hamer idea, and offers the baton to a new generation of those with a passion for art that comes from unusual places, and who might themselves wish to bring it to a broad audience.

Nico van der Endt (centre) in conversation with Richard Bennaars (back to camera)

A Vision Forever Fresh: De laatste werken uit Nico van der Endt's Galerie Hamer is on show at Galerie Atelier Herenplaats, Schietbaanstraat 1, 3014 ZT, Rotterdam, The Netherlands until 6 April 2024

The Expressive Colour of Black and White Art

Monochromatic Minds: Lines of Revelation

Jennifer Lauren Gallery, at Candid Arts Trust, London
25 February – 4 March 2020

Monochromatic Minds installation view, including works by Terence Wilde

Monochromatic Minds is the latest venture of the peripatetic Jennifer Lauren Gallery. This ambitious exhibition, featuring 61 artists and around 150 works could be seen recently at Candid Arts Trust, London. The premise of the show was disarmingly simple; a selection of black and white art made by artists who have at times been gathered under the rubric of outsider art. The result, however, was a sophisticated system of compelling art that transformed the gallery space into an energetic, thought-provoking and highly intellectually satisfying visual conversation.

Works by Julia Sisi and introductory wall text

It is all too easy for an exhibition containing as many artists as this, and who come, moreover, from a wide range of lived contexts, to descend into visual incoherence. “Monochromatic Minds” does not. Cohesion is gained through curatorial restriction to the inclusion of monochrome works and essentially to drawings (even the relatively few three-dimensional objects in the show are essentially essays in the drawn mark). There is also a tendency toward a very shallow picture space in all the two-dimensional works included, which also assists the visual logic.

Monochromatic Minds installation view, with works by Albert (left) and Mami Yoshikawa (right)

Work in the show ranges from the boldly emblematic – Davood Koochaki, James Alison, Liz Parkinson – to densely worked, near claustrophobic essays in detail – Carlo Keshishian, David Abisror, Leslie Thompson, Chris Neate. It also collectively runs the gamut of techniques of conscious abandonment so beloved of the surrealists, from automatic drawing and writing – Malcolm McKesson, Julia Sisi, Dan Miller, Harald Stoffers, Beverly Baker, Cathy Ward – to mediumism – Madge Gill, Agatha Wojciechowsky – and visionary perception – Raymond Morris, Nick Blinko, Ody Saban. Visual Symbols dredged from the unconscious, whether through dream or imagination, are also commonly present, from Evelyne Postic and Margot’s tumescent organic images, to Jane Davigo’s suggestive symbolic narratives and Olivier Daunat’s remarkably spatial, yet airless, precise urban universes.

Beverly Baker, Untitled, 1998, ballpoint pen on paper (Latitude Arts)

Monochromatic Minds installation view, with works by, l to r Chris Neate, Cathy Ward, Evelyne Postic (top and bottom), Margot (middle), David Abisror

At times images arise from the experience of pareidolia, or a process of seeing-in to the figurative content of objects, as in Mehrdad Rashidi’s manipulated photographs and Gwyneth Rowlands’ flint figures. A near-automatic methodology and use of the suggestiveness of materials and emotion characterises Terence Wilde’s mixed media miniatures. Just about everything in the show seemed to be driven by an active process of evolution and growth, rather than some preconceived compositional conceit. Blinko’s exquisite drawings unfold, so to speak, only to be threatened by the weight of detail that packs the picture space, so that the whole is held in the most precarious of visual balance; a metaphor perhaps of human hovering between life and death. Indeed, in the case of two untitled figure drawings by the late Nigel Kingsbury, it is hard to say whether we are experiencing a smoky coming-into-being or a gentle, diaphanous dissolution of form.

Nick Blinko, Untitled, 2019, pen and ink

Nick Blinko, Crucilivas Arborilus, 2018, pen and ink

Nigel Kingsbury, Untitled, nd, pencil (ActionSpace)

One of the satisfying aspects of “Monochromatic Minds” is that it restricts itself neither geographically nor temporally in making its aesthetic choices – fourteen nations are represented here in a timescale that stretches from the present to around eighty years ago. In this way, the curator, Jennifer Gilbert was able to choose works that invited close individual attention by viewers and also consideration as a group in the liminal space of the gallery. Given the amount of planning and effort that had clearly gone into producing this project, which also included public artist talks, a short film and a published catalogue, it seems a shame that it ran for such a tantalisingly short time. I have no doubt that it will remain fresh in the minds of those who were lucky enough to see it for some time to come.

A catalogue is available, with an Introduction by Jennifer Gilbert and short essays by myself, Lisa Slominski and Judith McNicol, Manchester: Jennifer Lauren Gallery, 2020, 140pp, 73 col. and b&w plates, £10

https://www.jenniferlaurengallery.com/

Davood Koochaki

Leonhard Fink, Adam and Eve in Paradise, 2018, pencil

Malcolm McKesson (left) and Raymond Morris (right)

Agatha Wojciechowsky, Untitled, 1968, pen and ink

Monochromatic Minds installation view, including works by Ody Saban and Judith McNicol

Monochromatic Minds installation view

Vale Roger Cardinal

"Roger Leaving" by Colin Rhodes (ink on paper, November 2019)

Roger Cardinal will always be known as for his introduction of the term ‘outsider art’, conceived as an impressionistic attempt to create an anglophone equivalent for the French term, ‘art brut’, invented by the artist Jean Dubuffet in the 1940s. Ironically, as a linguist – Cardinal was fluent in French and German – he was comfortable with the French term. It was his publisher who insisted on inventing a new one for the history of the subject he published early in his career in 1972, for fear that an English and American market would not take to art brut. The term outsider art was taken up by dealers and collectors (many of them mainstream artists), especially from the end of the 1970s, and it came to embrace work from a much wider range of situations than Dubuffet envisaged. Cardinal always regretted this expansion and colonisation by a range of other sub-genres. He remained committed to his term, though, and continued to use it throughout his later writing on the subject, not least in his 1979 project with the art dealer Victor Musgrave for London’s Hayward Gallery, “Outsiders: an art without precedent or tradition.” It remained one of his few regrets that this major exhibition did not penetrate British culture more deeply or alter attitudes in universities towards its study as a serious subject.

Cardinal was far from one-dimensional in his interests. He had a lifelong passion for those areas of cultural production driven by ideas that fused the literary with the visual. He had a passion for Romanticism and made important contributions to scholarship on the subject. He wrote about Henry Moore, Paul Nash and Kurt Schwitters, and completed a manuscript on Prehistoric Art (as yet, unpublished). But it was probably his encounter with surrealism that most defined him, a movement to which he became enamoured while in Paris as a student of French at Cambridge University.

Roger in Margate, 27 November 2011

He wrote his PhD on surrealist constructions of love, and his book on André Breton’s Nadja appeared in 1984. His first book, which he wrote with Robert Short in 1970, was a little history of surrealism, and he was a regular participant at the surrealist conference gatherings at West Dean, the former home of the English poet and supporter of the movement, Edward James. It is fitting that he contributed the chapter on surrealism and outsider art to the important exhibition, “Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1992.
Cardinal shared the surrealists’ love of marginalised things, and of the revelations and beauty produced by the operations of chance. I remember many walks with him, when he would suddenly divert us down some alley, or wander into a store for no other reason than they might reveal something of hitherto unknown interest. He would constantly point at little, unusual details, a mannerism, or an interaction between people across the street.

His entanglement with surrealism also led him to Dubuffet, who he met in Paris at the end of the 1960s and with whom he corresponded, and to art brut. Like all good surrealists, Cardinal was not a joiner of clubs and associations. This did not prevent him from being invited to contribute to numerous publications and to speak, especially on outsider art, across the world. His presence often acted as a catalyst for things to happen, which I’m not sure he was not entirely aware of. A flowering of outsider art in Australia, for example, that occurred in the mid-1980s was in no small part a result of his presence in the country on a brief fellowship at the Australian National University. He occasionally accepted formal positions, for example as a juror for Triennial of Naïve Art and as a member of the consultative committee of the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, and he was closely associated as contributing editor with the British outsider art magazine Raw Vision from its inception in 1989.

R C in profile by Colin Rhodes (ink on paper, 2017)

Cardinal’s intellectual interests and warm, generous manner stood him in great stead for his chosen career as an academic, most of which he spent as a teacher and researcher at the University of Kent, eventually as a professor. His dislike of bureaucracy and administration, however, meant that he neither sought nor accepted senior university positions and left him increasingly ill-suited to the managerialist culture of higher education that emerged towards the end of his career. It is important to remember the many generations of students that benefited from his teaching. He lived quietly in a little cottage near Canterbury, where he brought up two sons with his wife, Agnès, whom he met when they were both students. Roger was a most generous, gentle and hospitable person. Always happy to share his knowledge and to help others on their way. He was avuncular and sociable, liking nothing better than a day visiting galleries and wandering through city streets with a genial companion, punctuated by a pub lunch. Walks with Roger were never focused on a preconceived destination, but surrealist wanderings à la Breton and co. Side alleys were always more interesting than main streets, and random, discarded objects were often the impulse to assume a role. He endured large groups with equanimity, but preferred small gatherings, where his gentle wit sparkled brightest. He was a fan of jazz and an enthusiastic, if middling trumpeter. He also drew constantly, mostly on the folded sheets of paper on which he made copious notes for future use whenever the fancy took him. His books, too, tended to be heavily notated in his tiny, but beautifully legible script, with the language of notation matching that of the text. Roger was also an inveterate and assiduous diarist. There are many volumes reflecting not only his thoughts and experiences, but also the many places that he visited. These books are filled with collaged street maps, menus and other ephemera, providing an amazing picture of place, context and time. Any of us who touched his life somehow are in there, somewhere.

I have lost a dear friend, mentor and occasional sketching partner. He took me on many a surrealist ramble in places like Whitstable and Margate. We shared many a pub lunch. And we talked and talked about art and the artists we loved. There always seemed to be a book he owned that would fill a gap in my knowledge, or some acquaintance he had made that I would do well to look up. He was a gentle polymath and linguist; one of the most generous intellectuals I ever met. My heart goes out to Agnès. RIP Roger Cardinal (27 February 1940 - 1 November 2019).

Roger and Agnès Cardinal awaiting lunch at The Old Bell, Rye, 21 October 2017