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Gerhard Hofland proudly presents the exhibition Levity by
Henk Stallinga. Stallinga is both a visual artist and a designer.
Although he does not consider his product designs to be fine arts,
parts thereof are often transformed into conceptual multimedia installations
and sculptures. A minimalistic visual language, light, sound and
movement are recurring elements in them. The exhibition consists of the
light installation Lumen
Balance, the series Breathe
In Breathe Out, wherein paintings are combined with tube
lights, and the installation A
Couch to Match the Painting.
The concepts behind Stallinga's works are often based on our awareness
of the everyday world around us. This involves concepts like sense of
time, sonorous and visual perception and experience of energy in the
form of light, heat or movement. The observer is often left surprised
or even optically deceived by Stallinga's works in which everyday
phenomena are presented in a different context.
In his installation A
Couch to Match the Painting, Stallinga offers another
perspective on the clichéd idea of “the painting above the sofa”. In
the installation both sofa and painting are stripped of their primary
function. By showing the painting backwards and thus revealing the
stretcher, and by hanging the canvas loose in space, Stallinga
deconstructs the illusion of a two-dimensional painting into a pure
three-dimensional object of wooden laths and a piece of cloth. The sofa
in this installation is made of the same materials as the painting, the
focus is also on the material structure. However, in this context it is
the sofa that is elevated from practical object to sculpture.
In the light installation Lumen
Balance lamp tubes float in the gallery space as
naturally moving mobiles. These lamp tubes create various hues of white
light, in which we can recognise the hourly and seasonal changes in
daylight. Stallinga plays with the perception of light by making the
viewer aware of the influence that light has on our perception of time
and our sense of warmth, simultaneously showing us light as an energy
that moves.
Light also plays an important role in the series Breathe In Breathe Out. Stallinga
literally frames light by hanging circular lamp tubes that are strung
together in front of a canvas. Like a painter he attempts to direct
light and dark to achieve a visual illusion. By varying the light's
intensity or by partially covering the lamp tubes, forms and
depth optically emerge. The subtle brightening and dimming of the light
creates associations with the rhythm of our breathing. It is this
visual game with physical and optical patterns, realised through
ingenious programming and production that makes Stallinga's work so
intriguing.
Henk Stallinga (1962) lives and works in Amsterdam. In 1993 he
graduated from the Rietveld Academy, after which he opened his own
studio that is co-owned by management partner Annemarie Galani.
Stallinga's works are part of several permanent collections, including
the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Fonds National d'Art Contemporain
in Paris and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Stallinga is currently
working on a major solo exhibition in Japan, that opens in 2017.
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