My Sister’s House, 2024
Hopie Hill
Charles Moffett
“Every painting is a dance with the past and, try as they might, no painters ever dance alone,” artist Matthew Hansel told Artsy. His comment was specifically referring to Dutch Golden Age still-life painting, a genre that spanned the 17th century. These artists’ influence permeates Hansel’s practice. “Dutch still-life painters understood (as every painter must) that an object is more than just its dimensions and sheen,” Hansel added, referencing the rich symbolism that painters like Clara Peeters, Pieter Claesz, and Jan Brueghel the Elder were known for.
Hansel is far from the only contemporary artist intrigued by the Dutch Golden Age. Indeed, several rising painters today are drawing inspiration from the genre, depicting everyday and domestic objects to convey greater meaning about life. Dutch Golden Age artists were known for their exploration of the inescapability of mortality (or memento mori) and the vanity of earthly pursuits, known as vanitas painting—two themes that resonate in contemporary art. Throughout both Dutch Golden Age and contemporary art, symbols like clocks and candles signal the passage of time, and vessels overflowing with flowers and food in different stages of decay represent the demise of life and beauty.
In The Land Of The Unloved, Laughter Is King, 2022
Matthew Hansel
The Hole
The Bounty Of Our Love Grows Silent and Unseen, 2022 -2023
Matthew Hansel
The Hole
The Dutch Golden Age marked a time of prosperity in which science, art, and international trade flourished, bringing new ideas and luxury foreign items. Artists responded by departing from the portraiture and religious themes of earlier genres. Instead, Dutch Golden Age artists’ still lifes added darker elements and reminders of death with skulls, wilting flowers, and mice devouring sumptuous feasts. “You could almost get the idea that these painters were utterly depressed and completely nihilistic—if the paintings weren’t painted so damn beautifully,” Hansel said. “Their painstaking devotion to craft and silky virtuosity reveals a more poignant power which can be conveyed through an object—the optimistic power and everlasting appeal of beauty.”
In Hansel’s still lifes, sumptuous arrays of food fill the compositions. Cheese seems to be a particular favorite for the artist—not unlike Peeters, who often featured piles of bread and cheese painted with a near fanatical devotion. Departing from the realistic style of the Golden Age’s homage to fromage, Hansel imbues surreal, contemporary twists. In his paintings, wax-coated cheese might sit next to modern specialties like Ritz crackers and molded jello.
Masquerade, 2024
Christian Ruiz-Berman
Mindy Solomon Gallery
Joining Hansel in drawing inspiration from the Dutch Golden Age are several of his contemporaries, including Mexican American painter Christian Ruiz-Berman, who became interested in the genre after visiting the National Gallery in London early in his teens. “Like Tibetan thangka paintings, Persian miniature works, or Mayan stelae (three of my favorite art forms), Dutch flower paintings use rich detail to speak of human stories, tragedies, and joys in an allegorical and distilled manner,” he said. “I use symbology to create a type of open-ended meaning making, and a vehicle for each viewer to find themselves among both universal tropes and highly specific cultural networks.”
Ruiz-Berman’s paintings are filled with a “tumult of bricolaged visual samples,” as he described them. In Dar tiempo al tiempo (2024), for example, he’s blended a kaleidoscopic assortment of imagery, including a clock representing the passage of time, and praying mantises symbolic of good fortune. Carefully crafted and rendered with a keen attention to detail, the symbolism forms “an individual poem,” he said.
Good News, 2024
Hopie Hill
Charles Moffett
If Ruiz-Berman’s paintings offer poetry, Hopie Hill’s comprise a personal novel. Her current solo exhibition at Charles Moffett, “The Souvenir,” is a testament to this. “Inspired by the Dutch Golden Age tradition, my starting point is wonder and beauty as a baseline for exploring the subtler moods and questions of my experience of womanhood—finding partnership, struggling to get pregnant, or giving birth,” she said.
The works in the show trace these experiences, using symbols to illustrate Hill’s emotions in the same manner as some of her favorite Dutch Golden Age artists, including Peeters and Rachel Ruysch. (The latter is a successful painter overlooked in art history who will have her first monographic exhibition at the Toledo Museum of Art this spring.) “[These] painters told stories about power and status by using symbolic objects,” Hill said. “We continue to arrange and present our collected objects (usually online), to suggest our own idealized narratives.”
Instead of skulls and clocks, Hill draws from contemporary culture. She depicts scratched-off lottery tickets in 9 Chances to Win (2024), evoking the potential highs and lows they bring. In Good News (2024), she painted sumptuous cakes to suggest group celebration, alongside a deck of cards arranged for Solitaire, implying solitude. Two joker cards sit to the side, perhaps a sign of something or someone deceptive having been removed.
The Birth of My Son, 2024
Hopie Hill
Charles Moffett
Benign Right, 2023
Kirsten Deirup
HESSE FLATOW
This contemporary use of symbolism is also at the heart of Kirsten Deirup’s work. Resembling ecological memento mori, Deirup’s still lifes use muted colors and hazy backgrounds, as spindly plants grow from half-dead stems. Like Dutch Golden Age artists, Deirup adds everyday objects, including power cords and slices of bread. “When I paint [these] items, I aim to imbue them with meaning that speaks to ideas around consumption, utility, and ecology,” she said. “In doing so, I hope to create a tension that resonates between beauty and decay.”
In Benign Right (2023), this tension is apparent in the seemingly dying tree planted in a woven basket. At the ends of the branches are brooch-like flowers with gaudy gemstones, apparently trying to mask the decay with opulence. Two spray bottles sit nearby: Are they filled with life-giving water, or perhaps a chemical that might artificially sustain the plant, but will inevitably further the destruction of the natural world?
Vanitas, 2023
Michelle Nguyen
Bau-Xi Gallery
Seance (Dinner Theatre), 2024
Michelle Nguyen
Unit
Many artists inspired by the Dutch Golden Age cite this fraught relationship between beauty and decay as part of the genre’s intrigue. Taking a cross-cultural approach, Michelle Nguyen blends still life with the Vietnamese tradition of creating altars with objects like fruit, incense, and candles. “In every Vietnamese household or business, one can normally find a small altar,” she said. “As a method of ancestral worship, one could consider the Vietnamese altar to be a form of memento mori. The altars are for deceased loved ones to watch over the living, and remind the living of all who came before them.”
For artist Marisa Adesman, the Dutch Golden Age’s interest in domestic objects is a major draw. “By elevating the domestic, these paintings bring significance to spaces and objects typically relegated to the background, along with the women caring for them,” she said. In her recent work, Adesman has been interested in Victorian stage magic and illusions, specifically “the disappearance or disfigurement of the female assistant—the ‘vanishing woman,’ as art historian Karen Redrobe aptly terms her,” Adesman said, adding that this figure “raises questions about the darker undercurrents of these seemingly harmless spectacles.”
June Drop, 2024
Marisa Adesman
Anat Ebgi
Vanishing women appear in works like Red Sky Morning (2023) and June Drop (2024), their bodies seemingly turning into a transparent material. Adesman also uses flowers to stand in for the magician’s assistant, depicting them as dangling upside down and falling through a trapdoor in Out from Under (2023) and submerged in water and bound by chains in Predicament Escape (2024). These flowers, as well as the female assistants who inevitably reappear unharmed, also represent resilience.
Other artists are bringing a more high-tech approach to the subjects of the Dutch Golden Age. In their current exhibition “A Closer Look,” on view through February 28th at the London gallery they run, Rob and Nick Carter draw direct inspiration from the period. For this series, the duo isolated individual elements of famous Dutch Golden Age works and digitally remastered them using AI to underscore the attention their creators paid to details.
Oysters after Osias Beert, 2024
Rob and Nick Carter
Rob and Nick Carter
In Oysters after Osias Beert (2024), for instance, they depict a plate of shucked oysters, separating the gourmet snack from the drinks and additional plates of food that surround it in 17th-century Flemish painter Osias Beert the Elder’s version. “We aim to bridge the past and present, using technology to enhance the richness of tradition while sparking questions about how history and innovation collide in the way we perceive art,” the pair said.
While the world of today is a far cry from that of the Dutch Golden Age, the concerns of artists and the visual tools they use to convey them seem to endure. In many ways, the appeal of the still-life genre is understandable. Objects speak volumes about their owners, and what is more human than the quest to parse the complexities of life itself?
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/QXrotB2
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