Lily de Bont and Jan Maarten Voskuil
Art Gallery O-68 shows new work by Lily de Bont and Jan Maarten Voskuil, paintings that are full of perspective and ambivalence. Both have a love-hate relationship with the painting and solve this by cutting the canvas, destroying the stretcher frame, deforming it and sometimes then stretching the canvas again. The works are made with precision and attention. Both the application of the paint, the act of painting and its inversion: destroying. The destruction is done with the same dedication as the construction. Both approach painting conceptually as thinkers who seek out reversals and contradictions and elaborate them in thoughtful, humorous work.
installation view
Lily de Bont (Ulvenhout, 1958) reinterprets the canvas by radically cutting the canvas. The loose threads and the monochrome painted surfaces become complex compositions. In it, she makes something intangible like gravity tangible. With the work ‘Extended limit’ that de Bont made especially for the large space of O68, she stretches painting into the third dimension by cutting, folding and breaking the canvas. Lily de Bont lives and works in Rotterdam. She graduated with honors from the Sint Joost Academy Den Bosch in 1989. She received the “Lucas Prize” and the “Jan Hoet Prize” and was nominated by Jan Hoet for the Documenta IX in 1990. De Bont exhibits worldwide with representation in the Netherlands, Germany, the United States and Taiwan. Her works are included in collections of companies and private individuals at home and abroad
Jan Maarten Voskuil (Arnhem, 1964) asks himself what a painting can be more than linen stretched on a rectangle and how he can achieve the representation of light and dark without resorting to figurative illusion. He finds the solution in stretching the linen on a spatial stretcher frame. For example, he builds 3D paintings with modules that blur the boundaries between painting, sculpture and architecture. It remains painting, because it is still linen on stretchers. Voskuil graduated from the University of Groningen (General Arts, 1989) and completed the second phase of training at the Institute of the Arts in Arnhem (Ateliers Arnhem, 1997). He exhibits worldwide with representation in the Netherlands, Germany, the United States and Taiwan. Museum collections in which his work is represented include Frans Hals Museum Haarlem; Municipal Museum Schiedam, Schiedam; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; CODA Museum, Apeldoorn; Wilhelm Hack Museum, Ludwigshafen (D); Wannieck Gallery Brno (Cz); Geometric Madi Museum, Dallas (USA); Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar.