Ger Van Elk (1941)
Netherlands
Biography :
"Born in Amsterdam, Ger Van Elk is, with Jan Dibbets, one of the most representative Dutch artists of the generation that appeared at the end of the 1960s. He pursues critical and analytical reflection on 17th century art, particularly on painting. Dutch genre: still life, landscape and portrait. His beginnings are linked to a radically modernist conception of art where the use of painting gives way to new media, especially photography, which allows him to ask in other terms questions of perception of reality: Symmetry of Diplomacy, 1971 (two retouched color photographs, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam), shows a character (the artist posing as a diplomat) seated, facing an empty armchair. His position, symmetrical, differs (he is seated once on the right, once on the left), so that the gaze is directed towards the center where the absence is emphasized by the empty armchair. This work (fragment of a series) is the typical example of the destabilization of the gaze ironically sought by the artist. In 1974, he created the Adieu series: an ordinary landscape photographed against a background of a half-open stage curtain, and presented in a frame, the trapezoidal shape of which corresponds to that of the painting. More than a symbolic farewell to painting, this series illustrates the play, dear to Ger Van Elk, on the illusion of optical representation in the limited space of a flat surface.
Gradually, the color-retouched photo gives way to the paint which invades the painting, partially or almost entirely covering the photograph. At the same time, the painting gradually leaves the frame to insert itself in three dimensions in space: Olympic Sportive (1979, Art and Project, Amsterdam).
With the series of Still Lifes with Flowers, 1982 — color photographs of bouquets covered with paint in a style close to Pollock's dripping (Bouquet Antwerp, 1982, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam) — Ger Van Elk returns to the plan, faithful to his iconoclastic and humorous manner, which we find in the series of portraits.
In works such as Still Lifes with Fruit (1988), Ger Van Elk pushes the themes of his previous works to the extreme, playing with great mastery of the frame, photography and painting to create visual effects where he It is difficult to distinguish true from false, the illusory from the real, the plane from the volume.
In 1980, the A.R.C., the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris, devoted a major exhibition to his work and the Magasin, National Center for Contemporary Art in Grenoble, presented his works. In 1993, the Boymans-Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam presented the exhibition Sandwiches, 1991-1992, where objects grouped in an installation were characterized by their aggressiveness: pieces of wood or metal crushing photographs of different parts of the body of the artist."
(Source, website, Universalis)