Both Alejandra Venegas’ and Paul Beumer’s art have their roots in different cultures, from different countries, even different continents.
They presently have a duo exhibition at Dürst Britt & Mayhew.
Venegas (1986) draws her inspiration from the stories, techniques and subjects, not just from her home country Mexico, but also from Asia and Africa.
Beumer (1982), as usual, concentrates more on the materials themselves.
Beumer’s recent work, presented in this exhibition, is made of bark-cloth, which he collected and processed in Serawak (Malaysian Borneo).
When i saw this kind of work for the first time i must admit i was a bit put off by the somewhat stiff and rectangular nature of these collage-like works.
On the other hand, it probably takes time to get used to the language of certain materials and the way they speak for themselves, as the works seem quite convincing to me by now.
In the end Beumer always seems to find a way in which the material and a certain, often traditional, technique can completely speak for themselves, while presenting them in an intuitive and lyrical manner.
That’s how he came with the present series of works, partly based on the colours of the different times of the day.
The combination with Venegas’ work is a particularly happy one, as she clearly found her way in another very basic technique: woodworking and painting.
While in Beumer’s work the medium becomes the story, in Venegas’ work the story may be born from the medium or may intermingle with the medium.
In that way her colourful wooden reliefs become objects of wonder.
In the front space of the gallery Marwan Bassiouni (1985) shows some photographs from his series Prayer Rug Selfies.
I wrote an article about these works in Villa La Repubblica. Click here to read the article (in Dutch).
The few pictures shown here can be seen as additional to what i wrote in the article.
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© Villa Next Door 2020
Contents of all photographs courtesy to the artists and to Dürst Britt & Mayhew, Den Haag.
Bertus Pieters
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