Galleri Flach has the great pleasure to open the season with a presentation of the Dutch artist Lieven Hendriks. The exhibition ”Daybreak” contains a collection of works that deals with painting and its inexhaustible possibilities to disguise reality.
The Dutch painting tradition is vast and rich in pictorial representations in search for a kind of optical perfection. One of the greatest artists in the genre, Johannes Vermeer, has received admiration for his realistic and yet enigmatic painting since the seventeenth century. Although the illusory painting tradition is much longer than that it never ceases to challenge new generations of artists. Lieven Hendriks is working with an attempt to elude the viewer’s gaze through the painting’s ability to transform surfaces and objects in new and unpredictable forms. As viewers, we meet realism and illusion side by side; the painting is at once a real object in itself and pure illusion.
In the presentation, ”Daybreak”, Lieven Hendriks recreates a reality as it may appear through optical illusion. The motives of the paintings confuse the viewer. Confronted by a classic tromp l’oeil, we ponder the depth of vision, and hesitate over reality. What at first glance appears to be a crack in the glass, something torn away or scratches on canvas, is in fact a painterly production. Yet, the paintings of Lieven Hendriks are not pointing toward classic, antique illusions á la Pompeii. They rather refer to the modernist period of breaking up the classic depth and to let the painting step into the room and the reality, as in the concrete, modernist works of Lucio Fontana. The works of Hendriks allude in an interesting way to the entire history of art; both the time before and after the entry of modernism.
Lieven Hendriks is born in 1970 and studied at the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten, Utrecht and De Ateliers in Amsterdam. He lives and works in Arnheim, Holland. He has exhibited extensively in Europe and worldwide. This is his first exhibition in Sweden.