peergallery

Robbert-Jan Gijzen studied at the Stadsakademie in Maastricht and afterwards at de Ateliers in Amsterdam. In 1999 he won the Royal Dutch Prize for painting. After living partly in Antwerpen and Berlin he currently lives and works in Maastricht. The paintings by Gijzen are both conceptual and expressionistic. For his all-over compositions he takes texts phrases, which he uses as a kind of graffiti elements, covered in the ritmic pattern of pasty painterly brushstrokes. The texts are derived from pop songs, which are telling us something about the dark side of life. Periods in his oeuvre can be catagorized in colors. After a black period, a yellow one and a red and blue period, Gijzen is now focused on a pink/green contrast.

Artist statement: Driving my work is the need to react to the urban landscape and to reduce this to the basics of materiality, form, and pure painterly constructions. The main focus of my art practice is the creation, selection, and presentation of a visual language as paintings and installation art. Throughout this process I return to the question: What does it mean to act in and through painting on the urban landscape and what kinds of forms of action do painting suggest?

study:1977-1982, Academie voor Toegepaste Kunsten, Maastricht. Experiencing the work of the artist Han Rameckers can only be done by placing it right in the heart of life. The artist’s primary aim seems to be that life in general and his work in particular, should be enjoyed to the full and that we should not lose ourselves to obsessive detailism. Reviewing the works one notices that the work can as easily be a sculpture, painting, reproduction, text, installation or photo. The used materials are almost conventional, in each case simply handcrafted. We overlook the work of a village boy, who be way of the city almost effortlessly travels the globel village. Beside the diversity in format the works offer a great spectrum of conceptuel main points. In general this work aims to please esthetically while it also suggestt referring to important questions of life with a fair amount of malicious playfulness. The way these vital questions are reflected show a critical mind in a happy nature. Above all, it tries to convey the intention that any answer to life’s mysteries will not be revealed here and now. We have to accept this without subcoming to the unbearable lightness of being. Of these heavy themes only the edges, the shiny outside, is shown. The world anno 2002 consists of about 6 bilion worlds, after all. Mathieu Bruls, Januari 2002

Alex is painting his way from the picture to the painting. His only theme is the painting of a painting. The painting contains as little images as possible and is saturated with paint. His images are in search for the painting and his style is characterised by being no style at all. It has been like this for years… It’s not a question of style… It’s a question of character…

Dave de Leeuw (Heerlen/the Netherlands 1981) currently lives and works in Maastricht/the Netherlands. He grew up in a former industrial town scarred by decay, far from metropolitan cultural life, but always had a natural passion for visual expression, particularly drawing. And supported by his family he went to study at the academy of fine arts in Maastricht, where he graduated with a Bachelor Degree in 2008. His developing work was introduced to the art public by contemporary art collector Henk Pijnenburg and former museum director Wim van Krimpen. De Leeuw’s oeuvre contains mainly of paintings, drawings and occasional videoinstallations. His works show an abandoned humanity, struggling with itself and its surroundings. Unprejudiced he captures an intimate moment of reflection on the raw behaviour of mankind.

Gerardus van Velde, or Geer van Velde (5 April 1898 Lisse - 5 March 1977, Cachan, Paris) was a Dutch painter. Van Velde was the second son of Willem Adriaan van Velde, then owner of a small case of inland waterway transport fuelwood and charcoal on the Rhine and Hendrika Catharina von der Voorst, illegitimate daughter of an earl. Catharina and her four children (Neeltje, Bram, Geer, and Jacoba) were abandoned by Willem Adriaan after the bankruptcy of his business, leaving them in misery. Moving a lot, they eventually moved to The Hague in 1903. In 1910 at the age of twelve, Geer became an apprentice designer in the firm with Schaijk & Eduard H. Kramers. Kramers encouraged Geer to develop his interest in painting, as he did with his brother Bram van Velde.

Jerry Kowalsky (*1972) is a dutch artist who creates large scale drawings and sculptures. His artworks are on the one hand touchingly beautiful, on the other hand painfully attractive. He likes to challenge the audience and leaves us orphaned with a mix of conflicting feelings and thoughts. His works are saturated with irony, mental inertia, clichés and bad jokes. He often creates works that investigate the illusion of individualism, greed for sensation and mass consumption. By parodying mass media and demonstrating the omnipresent lingering of a ‘corporate world’, he criticizes the logic of the capitalist market system. In his current series of portraits he explores the concept of fear, violence and the dark side of humanity. Kowalsky studied fine arts and sculpting at the Maastricht Art Academy. In 2001 he received a grant by the Mondrian Fund and started building his career in Amsterdam, at that time still working under his birth name Jeroen Cremers. He is currently represented by the galleries “Vriend van Bavink” in Amsterdam and the “Peer Gallery” in Maastricht. His work has been exhibited in the USA, the Netherlands, Macedonia, the UK and Germany and was sold at Christies in Amsterdam. Jerry Kowalsky currently lives and works in Berlin.

Takashi Murakami (born in Tokyo on February 1 1962) is an internationally prolific contemporary Japanese artist. He works in fine arts media—such as painting and sculpture—as well as what is conventionally considered commercial media —fashion, merchandise, and animation— and is known for blurring the line between high and low arts. He coined the term superflat, which describes both the aesthetic characteristics of the Japanese artistic tradition and the nature of post-war Japanese culture and society. Superflat is also used as a moniker to describe Murakami’s own artistic style and that of other Japanese artists he has influenced.

As well as graduating from Czech Universities (the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague (VŠUP), J. Šalamoun; the Faculty of Creative Arts (FaVU), Brno, J. Načeradský), Lubomír Typlt also studied at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf (M. Lüpertz, G. Merz, A. R. Penck), where in 2004 he became the top student at the studio headed by A. R. Penck. Typlt’s paintings operate on two levels – critically oriented symbolised figuration and constructional (mechanical) abstraction operating on the level of utopia. In his last works the artist has synthesised both tendencies into a joint surface involving the visual encounter of two different expressive worlds, which also takes place outside of painting, in installations. The author takes several of his older themes and through their confrontation creates new levels of meaning. Formally we can observe a tendency toward expressive large-format figuration with strong communicative contents. Typlt creates “allegorised” figures of individuals who find themselves in their bestowed role on the border of seriousness and absurdity (Henri, Pinocchio, Alchemist).

Gerard (Ger) Lataster (Schaesberg, 16 februari 1920 - Amsterdam, 19 maart 2012[1]) was een Nederlands kunstschilder, die meestal wordt gekarakteriseerd als abstract expressionist. Lataster, zoon van een mijnwerker, volgde de Kunstnijverheidsschool in Maastricht. Vervolgens ging hij naar Amsterdam waar hij van februari 1941 tot augustus 1946 aan de Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten studeerde. Hij wordt gerekend tot de zogenaamde "Amsterdamse Limburgers", waartoe ook Pieter Defesche, Jef Diederen en Lei Molin behoren. In 1963 stond Lataster met Mari Andriessen, Nic Jonk, Theo Mulder en Wessel Couzijn aan de wieg van de alternatieve kunstopleiding Academie '63 (later Atelier '63 genoemd) te Haarlem, nu gevestigd als De Ateliers in Amsterdam. De motivatie achter dit initiatief was de wens om tegemoet te komen aan de behoefte van jonge kunstenaars om een periode te werken onder de kritische begeleiding van meer ervaren kunstenaars.

Jacques Timp’s (Venlo 1948) painting reflects his existentialist attitude to life. Years ago Timp, just like Bram van Velde who he admires deeply, opted for seclusion, emptiness, not-being. He made this decision, while at the same time he had no choice but to go his own way. This is why he resembles Bram van Velde, a loner in art history who wanted painting to be ‘an attempt to find the face of the faceless’.

Jan Cremer was born in 1940 and since then, like the proverbial cat, he has lived seven or nine lives at 100.000 volts. Globetrotting journalist, writer and planetary reporter, painter and graphic artist, man of letters, theatre and film maker: this existential freebooter lives at least seven lives at the same time, and note that I call him a freebooter, not a pirate; Jan Cremer has earned his letter of marque with flying colours, and it would be too easy and unjust to call him a professional provo or godless, guiltless adventurer. His love of art guarantees his love of mankind.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Es5N1cfFTbc

Luc Tuymans (born 1958) is a Belgian artist who lives and works in Antwerp. Tuymans is considered one of the most influential painters working today. His signature figurative paintings transform mediated film, television, and print sources into examinations of history and memory.

Bram (Abraham Gerardus) van Velde (October 19, 1895, in Zoeterwoude, near Leyden, Netherlands – December 28, 1981, in Grimaud, near Arles, France) was a Dutch painter known for an intensely colored and geometric semi-representational painting style related to Tachisme, and Lyrical Abstraction. He is often seen as member of the School of Paris but his work resides somewhere between expressionism and surrealism, and evolved in the 1960s into an expressive abstract art. His paintings from the 1950s are similar to the contemporary work of Matisse, Picasso and the abstract expressionist Adolph Gottlieb. He was championed by a number of French-speaking writers, including Samuel Beckett and the poet André du Bouchet.

Lucebert (Lubertus Jacobus Swaanswijk; 15 September 1924 – 10 May 1994) was a Dutch artist who first became known as the poet of the COBRA movement. He was born in Amsterdam in 1924. He entered the Institute for Arts and Crafts in 1938 and took part in the first exhibition of the COBRA group at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 1949. Lucebert's talent was discovered when he started working for his father after school. After half a year of art school, he chose to be homeless between 1938 and 1947. In 1947, a Franciscan convent offered him a roof over his head, in exchange for a huge mural painting. Because the nuns could not appreciate his work, they had it painted over with white paint entirely. He belonged to the Dutch literary movement of De Vijftigers. They were greatly influenced by the European avant-garde movement COBRA. So was Lucebert, especially in his early work. His art reflects a rather pessimistic view on the world.

Eugène Brands (January 15, 1913 - January 15, 2002 in Amsterdam) was a Dutch painter. He was briefly a member of the Cobra artist movement. In 1946, Eugène Brands participated in the group exhibition "Young Painters" in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where a whole room was filled with his work. In 1948 he joined the Experimental Group Holland, and in November 1949 he showcased his artwork in the "International exhibition of experimental art". Meanwhile, the Cobra movement was founded, a group he produced his best works with. However, differences of opinion and disagreements resulted in his departure and he decided to go solo. In the 1950s he was inspired by children's drawings.