Beating Around the Bush #7: False Flat

From the reopening of the museums on 26 January 2022, the Bonnefanten forms the stage for the exhibition False Flat, from the series Beating Around the Bush.

In False Flat, everything revolves around painting. There is a special focus on four exceptional artists, who are participating in small solo presentations: Hadassah Emmerich, Fons Haagmans, Rik Meijers and Marleen Rothaus, each of whom take their own approach to painting and show the breadth of the spectrum of the medium.

Multivocality

With regard to both form and content, painting can assume many different guises. False Flat celebrates this multivocality by spotlighting various painterly approaches. The exhibition is not restricted to art on a flat surface, but also pays attention to more experimental and cross-disciplinary practices, presenting formalist examples alongside engaged and activist works.
This presentation has opted for a dynamic approach, alternating the ‘chorus’ of voices from the collection and outside it a few times over the space of a year, so that the four ‘soloists’ are shown in a different light each time. This changes the nature of the exhibition every couple of months, thus displaying the wealth and diversity of painting and of the Bonnefanten’s collection.

The four soloists

In False Flat, the artworks of the spotlighted artists enter into dialogue with the work of artists in the collection and outside it. They play with the concept of painting, whether stretching it or getting to its essence from a different angle. The four soloists are:

  • Hadassah Emmerich (Heerlen, 1974) is regarded as one of today’s most important Dutch painters. She makes exuberant, sensual paintings that stimulate the senses. Her creative process has a cyclic character, in which shapes and patterns keep recurring in a different composition or context, so that her works are in continual dialogue with one another.

  • Fons Haagmans (Schinnen, 1948) is one of the protagonists of painting from Limburg and the Netherlands. He has had a great influence on the Dutch art scene and on younger generations of artists. Over his long career, he has proved that painting lends itself equally well to abstract work and to figurative representation.

  • In his solo presentation, I know where Rik Meijers lives, Rik Meijers (Rotterdam, 1963) shows no less than 62 new works which together form an impressive installation. When Meijers paints, he says, he enters a new world that has its own rules and logic, and where every little detail can make a difference. Meijers has become internationally known for his sculptural paintings in which he uses unconventional materials.

  • Marleen Rothaus (Bielefeld, 1991) is an artist, feminist and social worker. She is a fierce advocate for the rights of people who deviate from the cisgender, heterosexual male. Rothaus has gained international recognition for her oil paintings, which she carries around as banners at feminist marches, protests and interventions on the streets.

Besides the four solo presentations, False Flat also shows works by the following artists: Bob Eikelboom, Vera Gulikers, Mary Heilmann, Laura Lima, Edward Lipski, Mark Manders, Katja Mater, Navid Nuur, Lara Schnitger, Chaim van Luit and Julius von Bismarck.

BAB #7: Vals Plat, Hadassah Emmerich, Bonnefanten 2022. Photo: Peter Cox.
BAB #7: Vals Plat, Fons Haagmans, Bonnefanten 2022. Photo: Peter Cox.
BAB #7: Vals Plat, Rik Meijers, Bonnefanten 2022. Photo: Peter Cox.
BAB #7: Vals Plat, Marleen Rothaus, Bonnefanten 2022. Photo: Peter Cox.

Collection presentation Beating Around the Bush

Beating Around the Bush is an exhibition programme in which the Bonnefanten presents its collection in an explorative way. In different episodes, both the fixed values and the ‘quiet reserves’ of the collection are brought into dialogue with interventions from outside, which function as mirrors that offer new content-related insights and perspectives.

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