Rob Voerman and David Haines

Exhibition with objects and linoleumprints by Rob Voerman and in the basement drawings by David Haines.

Rob Voerman

ARTIST STATEMENT: My graphic art as well as my sculptures are a comment on the over-organised Dutch society in which danger, decay, disorder and uncertainty is systematically banned from day to day life. In my work I feel the need of constantly undermining images and structures that I see around me, to transform them and place them in an other context within my work. This is certainly fed by an increasing feeling of irritation and discontent with the developments mentioned before.
The aspect of really using my sculptures, for example as a bar,
smoking-area, telephone-centre, etcetera, is getting more and more important. By this the work will more and more compete with reality and thereby increase its power.
Recently a have started working on a series of work which will be about a fictive society, somewhere between a terrorists-organization and a hippy-community. Futuristic but also archaistic architectural fragments and constructions of communities with a strange atmosphere between evilness and utopia.

David Haines

"Curiouser and curiouser!" cried Alice. And she went on planning to herself how she would manage it." (Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carol.)

David Haines (Nottingham, 1969) describes his latest series of drawings as a 'romantic, tainted autobiography'. The drawings are based on photographs derived from the myriad of (self) portrait images found on the internet.
Figures are isolated from their pictorial backgrounds and reduced to images floating within the frame of the found and aged paper he works on.
The images are initially chosen instinctively; it is through the process of drawing that he discovers the thing that arrests his glance, be it the seam of a dress, a shoe, or a line of pubic hair. Sexual at first sight, the figures, some blindfolded and on their knees, others in schoolgirl dresses, seem punitive and brutal in their execution. Haines' addition of chewing gum, seemingly spat out onto the paper, or dust collected from his bedroom floor, strengthens disrespect for the image and figure. At the same time, these gestures and the delicacy and attention to detail with which Haines has drawn them, suggests a personalisation of an image that was intended to be anonymous in its initial publication. For Haines, drawing is an activity fundamental to existence, which bears witness to the presence of the artist. This presence and the uniqueness of each drawing, Haines believes, is now more relevant than ever in light of the relentless advances in gigabyte digital photography.
(text by Craig Bell, 2005)