In this exhibition the Hague artists Ellen Rodenberg & Maarten Schepers and their Indonesian counterpart Wimo Ambalah Bayang will show the work that they have made during their residency in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

Here you can visit their weblog which they kept during their visit.

Notebooks with texts and pencil drawings the artist has made for years are the ingredients for the exhibition at Heden. These 144 notebooks form a wealth of ideas, thoughts, and observations represented in drawings. The way Dirkx's process of drawing and noting down is done is comparable to the working of a seismograph: before he thinks up drawings, they actually are already in his notebook.

The publication that accompanies the exhibition contains drawings from 23 different notebooks. They represent a logbook which gives a view into thousands of drawings that the artist recorded in his notebook. The renewed acquaintance with Piet Dirkx's work at Heden (his last exhibition in The Hague at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag dates back to 1995) is very interesting. Piet Dirkx lives and works in Eindhoven.

Problems regarding the function and the character of the line

Drawings

On the occasion of the farewell of Michiel Morel as director, Heden presents an exhibition with drawings of Ad Dekkers (1938-1974). Dekkers, whose work belongs to the movement of geometric abstraction, took to drawing especially in the final years of his career (as from 1970) when the line became increasingly important in his work. The straight line. To quote Dekkers: ‘a straight line is the shortest connection between two points and is created by the movement of a point.'

Heden bids farewell to its director Michiel Morel

Michiel Morel is retiring as Director of Heden. Morel worked for 35 years at Heden, where he started in 1974 almost on his own when Heden was still known as Artoteek. Expanded under his management to a vital art centre with a staff of 15, Heden organizes exhibitions, art projects, and art education at four locations. Michiel Morel staged exhibitions about Hague ‘affairs' such as Haagse Nieuwen and Haagse Kopstukken.
Other exhibitions included, for example, Jan Andriesse, Teun Hocks, Piet Ouborg and Edwin Zwakman. He organized many art missions to non-Western countries.
Since 2006 Heden also has an artist-in-residence project for Dutch artists in Indonesia. The Ad Dekkers exhibition is a farewell present by way of thanks for all Michiel Morel has achieved for Heden and the visual arts in The Hague.

Closed for public
Heden will be closed on the 30th of April and the first of May.

This exhibition will show graphic highlights of their production. In the accompanying publication thirteen designers and publishers elaborate on this special couple in the printing profession.

Heden opens the new season with Echo, an exhibition with works of Henrik Kröner and Jeroen Glas. The opening will take place on Sunday 6 September at 01:00 p.m.

Both the artists have been invited to make an exhibition based on their mutual interest, that is: light. Their interest is expressed in different ways, but has as basic principle the painting tradition.

Jeroen Glas (Groningen, 1981) uses ‘black light' a lot. He incorporates this specific light in small installations which remind of paintings.  Works are composed in a very meticulous way, and constructed of various elements. Sometimes, you can follow this process of development perfectly: at a number of works you can see the back of the work. Jeroen Glas graduated in 2005 at the Frank Mohr Instituut.

Henrik Kröner (Nordhorn, Germany, 1979) is very much engaged at the moment in encaustic painting, also known as hot wax painting, an old painting technique that involves using heated beeswax to which pigments are added. Because this transparent encaustic painting is used on very thin canvas, he can also use the back of the surface as visual image. Henrik Kröner graduated in 2008 at the Frank Mohr Instituut.

Glas and Kröner will cooperate at Heden, where they will create a ‘site specific' artwork at the Denneweg.

Sybrandt van Keulen has been asked to write an essay on the work of Glas and Kröner. Van Keulen works as a teacher in filosophy for the University of Amsterdam. He also works as a chief-editor for the magazine Aesthetics.

download 'The Return of the Nimbus'

The exhibition includes works of several artists who participated in Landing Soon, the artist in residence programme of both Heden and Cemeti Art House in Yogyakarta (Java), Indonesia. At Heden, the works of Ralph Kämena, Urs Pfannenmüller, Elizabeth de Vaal, Cilia Erens, and Rosalie Monod de Froideville are being shown. House fronts with advertisements and synthetic parts are dominating elements in Yogyakarta’s streets. Urs Pfannenmüller shows in a few architectonic models the front, which expresses power and representation; the back of the house is dilapidated and neglected. The models are not a real translation of existing buildings but an essence of his observations.

In a series of water colours of the same street over and over again with a black-and-white checked central reservation, he shows how old and new buildings are side by side and sometimes interlocked.

Elizabeth de Vaal shows a painting with a part of a house as a frame, a Gebyog (door carving). The book Art Criticism contains the most important western works of art and has been copied a dozen times. In the end, all that is left of a Mondriaan are just some lines and dots. This image, together with the reading of Helena Spanjaard’s Het ideaal van een moderne Indonesische schilderkunst, and seeing big, carved frames at an Indonesian painter’s studio have resulted in this work. 

Sound Space Yogya, a Sound Diary and Nyepiwalk are two works by sound artist Cilia Erens. She got her inspiration for the first work from what she calls the ‘ear catchers’ of Yogyakarta – the sound themes with which her ears got stuck outside in the streets. For Nyepiwalk (Walk in Silence) she was guided by a recurring theme in her work: public silence. Click here for more information about this work. 

For the series of Anomalies, Rosalie Monod de Froideville asked immigrants in Yogyakarta to describe an object which represents their country of origin. These accounts were presented to local artisans. They didn’t get any explanation or sketches which forced them to place their own interpretation on the reproduction of these exotic objects. Her work Inbetweenness (not green, not grey) is an installation consisting of an islet of soil and a book.

Finally, the work In Transit of Rolf Kämena. It is a photo documentary about bureaucracy in Yogyakarta. In his picture essay he unravels the structure of the town hall as a labyrinth. Without getting personal, Kämena comes close to scrutinize his subject. The image that emerges from this approach shows a universal picture of the concept of bureaucracy. The accompanying catalogue (112 pp) contains his complete works.

Experimenting in photography and more specifically, experimenting with light on film is Katja Mater’s field of activity. She analyses light and shows us how it is captured in a lightproof box. The spectator is put to work. 

For a number of years Heden has been following and collecting Katja Mater’s work. The searching examination that characterizes her photographs does particularly appeal to Heden. Katja Mater employs the basic elements of photography, namely light and sensitive film. At first sight, it doesn’t exactly yield ‘beautiful’ pictures but, after all, that is not Katja Mater’s main purpose. Apparently, she very much enjoys searching the bounds of photography, and persuades the viewer to have a closer look. In her own words: “Instead of looking through photography – as a sort of transparent medium – my aim is to show the viewer photography itself.”  

The exhibition includes works that have been produced during the past year. There will also be a presentation of the publication Study on Colour by Katja Mater.  A number of artworks from the exhibition will be added to the collection of Heden, and will be available for you as from February next year.