Barbara Seiler

Barbara Seiler is proud to present a new exhibition of Dutch artist Marc Nagtzaam (*1968 Helmond, NL) after introducing his work in Switzerland in his solo exhibition The Erased Tapes in 2011 and various group shows at the gallery since the gallery’s inauguration.

VARIOUS ARTISTS is a group show featuring new drawings by Marc Nagtzaam as well as selected works by Koenraad Dedobbeleer, Katja Mater and Batia Suter, which have been invited by Marc Nagtzaam to participate in his exhibition. The show loosely revolves around parallels in the artistic processes and shared interests in researching, collecting, sorting and processing visual imagery.

The visual repertoire of Marc Nagtzaam’s drawings ranges from hard-edge abstraction to the reproduction of the written word that he collects from art magazines. There is a tension that runs through Nagtzaam’s practice of drawing when the repetitive and controlled quality of the geometric drawings converge with all the imperfect and personal gestures one expects from graphite on paper embodied in drawings of the written word. The language of abstraction and the abstraction of language enter a frame-by-frame interplay, when the artist manages to render the highly impersonal, codified and essentially almost abstract language of art journalism into manifestly personal images on the one hand and submits a rather personal process of abstraction on the other.

Nagtzaam’s geometrical drawings are based on collages of images collected by the artist from magazines or on previous drawings he made. More recently he has also focused on exhibition models by the Belgian artist Hans Demeulenaer. Once selected, they are organized in irregular puzzle-like grids, photocopied, and then traced over, such that only the adjoining, rectilinear contours of the images remain, effectively eroding the content of the collaged images. The unsteady grids reveal a pattern heterogeneous enough to suggest some obscure organizing principle, while the ineffably personal touch is saving the grids from being absorbed into the anonymity of the magazine’s graphic language.

Katja Mater’s (*1979 Hoorn, NL) work originates from an interest in themes such as the experience of time in photography, the documentation of moments and situations with intangible characteristics, the exploration of the limits of human perception, and the specifications of the analogue medium of photographic image from a meta perspective. Mater engages in a non-traditional use of camera equipment by which she analyzes and challenges the field of photography, creating a new type of process and product. Maters photographic works can be understood as a fundamental analysis or (re-)search for images within the means of photography. In relation to Nagtzaam’s geometric drawings Katja Mater is trying to find new possibilities with similar means, dots, lines and planes.

A sprawling archive of images sets the fundament of Amsterdam based, Swiss artist Batia Suter’s (*1967 Eglisau, CH) monumental photographic installations as well as for her works in book form. The pictorial encyclopedia-like works in black and white, the colors of the past, contain reproduced photographic images of artistic, everyday or natural objects and phenomena as well as paintings, prints, drawings, posters and advertisements. The different typography, font size and language of the captions suggest that the images originate from books, magazines and newspapers and were re-arranged by the artist. In regard to the often-criticized flood of images Suter has developed a specific strategy for dealing with the power of mass mediated images. However, Suter is not trying to finalize an encyclopedic outline with claim of a universal, comprehensive systematization of all human fields of knowledge, but – an thus relation to Nagtzaam’s handling the original images – a subjective selection of topics reflecting Suter’s personal focus and her profound interest in the act of collecting as such. Furthermore, Nagtzaam’s procedural examination of the mass-media image and the processing of images by personalized manners of abstraction as well as the interest in fluid patterns of order, that allows pictures to continue keep on moving without visible caesura or determinants and can be considered as another common focus of both artistic positions.

The works of Belgian artist Koenraad Dedobbeleer (*1975 Halle, BE) sharpen the perception of the complex relationship between objects and their appearance: Whether it is a sculpture, that is a sculpture and at the same time serves as a pedestal or whether it is a photograph of a sculpture or in other words, an object that can be read as a sculpture because of its setting. Dedobbeleer frees object from their everyday functions and presents an alternative system of functions and values through re-evalutaion and re-contextualisation. With regard to the particular exhibition space, the artist modifies functional objects such as tables, perforated partition walls or pillars frequently using photographs, projections and films or elements of writing. Objects and elements are developed into larger units and amalgamated into rooms in which the re-arranged individual parts comment on each other in unexpected ways.

A selection of ROMA Publications will complement the exhibition and include Marc Nagtzaam: Reissue, Katja Mater: Multiple Densities, Koenraad Dedobbeleer – Oeuvre Sculpte, Travaux Pour Amateurs, Batia Suter – Surface Series, Batia Suter – Untitled (Billboards), all books by Marc Nagtzaam with ROMA Publications, including the very first ROMA Publication, No.1, (SOME), in 1989.

Marc Nagtzaam’s work has been the subject of major group and solo exhibitions such as Minimal Myth at Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2012), Autumn of Modernism at De Kabinetten van de Vleeshal, Middelburg (2012), and The Unknown Group at Frac Bourgogne, Dijon (2010). His solo exhibition Not Available at the De Kabinetten van de Vleeshal, Middelburg will open in April this year. Other institutions that have shown and collected his work include MACBA, Barcelona (ES), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (NL), and S.M.A.K., Gent (B). He is represented by Barbara Seiler, Zurich and ProjecteSD, Barcelona.