Modern Art

More art for me today, after Mucha and Rossetti a very firm move into modern times. A friend of mine had an exhibition in a small Amsterdam gallery near the Rijksmuseum, and I went to have a look with her just before she took down all her works to make room for the next artist. I like her work very much. She used to paint trees in almost uncontrolled lines, gnarled trees, and now the lines seem transferred to the shapes of women. She has always used different backgrounds to her works like maps and pages from old books.

She had some oil paintings there, but some charcoal drawings too. Female forms drawn in simple black lines, in some cases combined with patterned wallpaper in a very beautiful way, in other cases drawn on the pages of an old book. And huge paintings of women drawn on cardboard boxes that once contained IKEA bookcases. Tiny pictures as well. Her works range from the poetic and the erotic to the harsh and realistic.

Above a black piano three small drawings of women in black ink. Drawings on pages from an old book.

The gallery was a beautiful space, two adjoining rooms separated by sliding doors, big windows on both sides so a lot of light. The place was once probably a posh appartment for someone. Some of the smaller paintings exhibited were of very stylish rooms, lavishly decorated, represented in small oil paintings. Small cupboards next to the sliding doors containing small paintings and objects collected by the artist, in some way related to the works. Newspaper articles, photographs, books, postcards, advertisements from magazines. It all fit together very well.

Some of the other oil paintings are bigger and they have a dreamlike quality, painted in light colours, women seen from both the back and the front, often near or in the sea.

Then I walked on to FOAM, the Amsterdam Museum for Photography. They had an exhibition of photographs by Man Ray and his model Lee Miller. A fascinating exhibition with some beautiful and well-known pictures, but also some small contact prints at least as interesting. Some of the big names of the era, like Tristan Tzara, but a few unknown models too. I like black and white photographs a lot, and this is a nice collection.

And now I just got back from a concert by Tom Barman, singer of the Belgian band dEUS. He played some of the band’s songs, and some covers of songs by other greats. I enjoyed watching him, and I enjoyed the simplicity of the concert. Just two men, a guitar and a piano, but great songs and a great performance.