KÜNSTLERHAUS

BETHANIEN

Künstler*innen

Iris van Dongen

Netherlands

Zola’s daughter/Rain of stars and comets, 2003/04

The work of Iris van Dongen is always instilled by gloomy romanticism. In recent years she has been producing drawings several meters in height, their sheer size giving them a quality one can hardly escape. Though van Dongen’s work comes about mainly in an intuitive manner, the theme ‘man tormented by demons’ seems to keep cropping up.

For that reason it often has a melancholic or malicious undertone. The women depicted have a far-away look, because van Dongen sees them as something abstract, as though they were figures from mythology. Although the drawings refer to earlier movements in traditional art, there is always a small element, such as the sweatband with the skull, which shows that it is from the present day: a symbol from a subculture and, at the same time, an age-old symbol. This gives extra emphasis to the aspect of mortality or melancholy – or neutralises it. “The oppositions that I juxtapose with each other – ‘good and evil’, ‘past and present’, and, literally, the ‘figurative’ and the ‘abstract’, are meant to blur the boundaries of these concepts.” [I.v.D.]

In this way the glooming ‘angels of death’ symbolise her psyche, as a mirror of her soul, and seem to pursue her, even though she has resigned herself to the fact that it is she who is pursuing herself.

Iris van Dongen, born 1975 in Tilburg (Netherlands).

 

STAY
24.02. – 13.03.2005

Grantee
Mondriaan Fonds