Vibrating between painting, fashion, sculpture, installation, architecture and performance, van den Hurk's work addresses the act of making in it’s numerous forms. Every configuration is considered and is part of the cohesive whole; from the placement of an object to the arrangement on the floor, from isolation of a pigment on stretched paintings hung on a wall, to a piece of silk fabric patch-worked and sewn into the collaborative, handmade suits and dresses hung flag like. The walls angled through spaces divide and create intimacy with the objects while simultaneously allows one to move around and find new vantage points providing additional layers.
Although actually comprised of static objects, van den Hurk’s practice is a movement or energy that is never quite still. Perhaps here one can note the first instance of transitivity, an influential term borrowed from David Joselit's 'Painting Beside Itself', which describes the ability of 'expressing an action which passes over to an object'. Quite literally, in his exhibitions the individual works hold references and traces of one another, such as bottles filled with fabric dye used in the production of the paintings.
On another level, these images and objects hold traces of their production, they become individual subjects separate from the artist upon which one can move through, walk around, and look at. Yet are they ever fully autonomous? Or rather are they inherently situated within networks of histories, temporalities, locations, and materials? photographed and uploaded into yet another strata of display and exchange?
If one can, even momentarily, regard the artworks themselves as independent agents, then both the viewer and the maker have a sense of shared ownership, everyone can view or bear witness once they are made part of an exhibition. In effect part of the artwork then is transferred into, through, onto, and then back out of each of us.
Artworks and exhibition mix, generate, move and pass, and become logged within each encounter.
- Cory Scorzarri (independent writer and curator, London), 2014
Bas van den Hurk studied Fine Art at Academy St. Joost in Breda and Philosophy of Aesthetics at the University of Amsterdam. His work has been show extensively worldwide at, amongst others, Wendy Cooper Gallery, Chicago; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven Autocenter, Berlin, Liste, Basel; Paul Andriesse, Amsterdam and Galeria Pancho Fiera, Lima, Peru; Recent solo exhibitions include Rod Barton, London, RH Contemporary, New York and Ginerva Gambino, Cologne and groupshows at Cell Project Space, London, De Vleeshal, Middelburg, Temporary Gallery, Cologne, Martin van Zomeren, Amsterdam and Thierry Goldberg, New York. Upcoming exhibitions include a solo show at Four Six One Nine, Los Angeles and two person shows at Jerome Pauchant, Paris and Halsey Mackay, New York. Van den Hurk sometimes curates and he teaches contemporary theory at MFA AKV/St. Joost. He currently lives and works in Tilburg, The Netherlands. basvandenhurk.com
Bas van den Hurk is also the co-founder and co-director of Whatspace. Whatspace is a roaming independent platform for contemporary art and cultural debate founded in 2008. Whatspace tries to find inherent inducements presented in ideas and works in order to create and give guidance to an engaged discourse that reaches further then the art world alone. whatspace.com
