Bob Bonies

Piet Tuytel

March 17 - May 5, 2024

opening Sunday 17 March, 16.00 hrs
bt Piet Tuytel
It's all about balance. In every image Piet Tuytel searches for the balance to stay on his feet. His sculptures are the buttresses of his existence. They are made of steel and are immovable in a position that is grounded. You can't get them out of place, although they always give the impression that they could fall on top of you. You must approach them with caution. If you go straight at it, you will be taken down with an outward cut. When he works on his sculptures, Piet Tuytel takes extremely heavy elements in a clasp and lifts them from his legs to move them and bring them into proportion with each other. His knees are no longer worth anything, but he still masters the martial art of making images in his head. His sculptures are trestles, wedges and plinths. They are struts and they form contrasts in hard colors. From the H and T beam he has created an alphabet of images. It is a steel script, a cuneiform script of our time. It sounds something together: weight and weightlessness, mass and void, matter and space, body and soul. His work is as concrete as poetry can be. The images suspend thinking and merge meanings. They form a unity in opposites. With Tuytel, however, the whole is never more than the sum of its parts: they fit together perfectly and when you least expect it, they kick you down. They are images like sweeping legs. After all the lashing and pulling, they elegantly lay you on their back: ippon. Piet Tuytel's sculptures make a point.
Alex de Vries
 
25 Years Galerie VIVID

September 15 - October 27, 2024

opening Sunday 15 September 2024
25yrs    
Gerd Arntz

Ever the same

prints and drawings 1950 - 1970
arntz Gerd Arntz

Gerd Arntz (1900 - 1988) gained international fame for his political woodcuts and symbols for visual statistics. Although Arntz produced a few paintings around 1930, he otherwise worked exclusively as a graphic artist. He made his choice for this profession at an early age and then limited himself to two techniques within the graphic arts: the woodcut and the linoleum cut. This limitation gives his oeuvre a great deal of cohesion. After a short expressionist period, he soon created his own, unmistakable visual form. There was no room for intermediate tones or shading, nor for the spatial illusion suggested by the perspective. In his woodcuts, Arntz constructed a world in two dimensions that is systematically made up of alternating black and white, in lines and planes.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Arntz's woodcuts analyze social contradictions; they want to teach, criticize and call for solidarity in the midst of revolt, repression and nationalism.
Wood was replaced by linoleum to cut his images and from 1950 the formats became larger, the compositions more complex. Again the prints reflected the world of that time. In large, moralizing and slightly mocking allegories Arntz depicts the aspects of joy and fear of those years. The world conceived as a carousel, carnival or circus: in the details the time remains legible, which was dominated by cold and colonial war, by nuclear threat and opposing powers. Fashions and styles change, but Arntz often seems to sigh: 'Semper idem' - 'Ever the same'