Another artist featured in Four Visions (see Robert Richenburg post below) is Hans Van de Bovenkamp, a Dutch-born internally known architectural designer and sculptor, who has designed, fabricated, and maintained unique sculptures, fountains, and installations in collaboration with architects and designers, producing over one hundred commissions. Small in scale, the works in this exhibition derive from his Menhir series and refer to monolithic form.
Adopted from the French Breton language (men [stone] and hir [long] [modern welsh maen hir or “long stone”], a menhir is “an upright monumental stone standing either alone or with others.” Found throughout Europe, Africa, and Asia (including Stonehenge) and originating from different periods in pre-history, such forms, once perhaps territorial markers or sites of Druidic human sacrifice, served functions that have been lost to time.
Describing traditional Menhirs as “sacred spaces…often associated with graves…suggest[ing] they were the primitive temples of a universal religion,” noted critic Donald Kuspit wrote that Van de Bovenkamp’s “Menhirs” seem in direct conversation with those of the past, despite being from bronze and stainless steel rather than stone. ”Their fluid edges suggest organic figures, and their fragmentation are “sublimely attuned to the life of every other fragment.”
www.Hamptons.com has a great article on Bovenkamp. It discusses his public works (great photos!) and has an interview with the artist:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.hamptons.com/The-Arts/Artists-of-the-Hamptons/7961/Artists-Among-Us-Artist-Profile-Hans-Van-de.html