Gerhard Hofland is proud to present Ghost Tropic, featuring all new works by Dutch artist Joan van Barneveld. This exhibition marks the first collaboration between Van Barneveld and the gallery.
Through monochromatic paintings Joan van Barneveld expresses a desire to operate outside of everyday conventions, to withdraw and escape from the structures that merely limit or undermine our individual sense of freedom. It is a desire that originates from the world of punk and rock ’n roll, but instead of staging a blunt revolt against the system, Van Barneveld has committed to the paradoxical task of depicting things that have disappeared.
The paintings of Van Barneveld show empty spaces, evacuated scenes or even mere shadows whose origin is obscured. By printing rather than painting, the artist has managed to create paintings that are devoid of any trace of a possible author. They are the result of a process of artistic negation through which Van Barneveld shifts our focus precisely from what is present to what is absent, emphasising that what you can see exists by virtue of what you cannot and vice versa.
By working from this fundamental sense of absence, van Barneveld proves that even things that are incomprehensible and for which there is no place within the limits of everyday conventions nevertheless do exist. Even the emptiness of the absent has a substance and while the artist’s paintings continuously point to what is not there, they function as a way to consider what is truly valuable – that what becomes painstakingly present in its absence.
Joan van Barneveld (1978, Veghel, NL) lives and works in Maastricht, the Netherlands. She graduated from the Academie Beeldende Kunsten Maastricht in 2001, and finished a post-graduate residency at the Jan van Eyck Academie in 2016. Works by Van Barneveld are part of many renowned public collections, such as the DSM Art Collection, De Nederlandsche Bank, Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, Museum het Domein, Sittard and SCHUNCK, Heerlen, among various private collections in Europe and the U.S. Joan van Barneveld has exhibited, among many other places, at the Bonnefantenmuseum, Het Domein, and at various galleries in Europa, New York and Los Angeles. In 2014, the monograph INTO LONGING, VAST ROCK was awarded a Best Dutch Book design award.
Joan van Barneveld – Ghost Tropic
Gerhard Hofland gallery, Bilderdijkstraat 165C, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
10 June – 22 July 2017
Opening: Saturday 10 June from 17:00 hours