Artist: Anneke Eussen
Exhibition title: The Labyrinth
Venue: Tatjana Pieters, Ghent, Belgium
Date: October 30 – December 4, 2022
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Tatjana Pieters
Anneke Eussen (NL, 1978). Eussen is known for her glass sculptures made with antique glass from numerous sources, including buildings and automobiles, mounted in plexiglas boxes and hung on the walls. Typically these materials would be discarded when their original uses have ended. In Eussen’s hands, they are the starting point for her meticulously assembled wall sculptures.
Eussen overlaps and layers different tones of colours of glass to create nuanced composition. She keeps the raw and broken edges of the materials and reassembles the pieces to create a new continuous line. The history of these materials is not entirely decipherable; their exact origin is unknown. Their historical lineage is open ended, the viewer questions their original function. The works emanate a tangible quality of humanity, as their previous functions allude to human contact.
Eussen’s works have many art historical precedents from Marcel Duchamp’s ready-made sculptures to the Arte Povera artists’ usage of typically throwaway materials. Eussen adds a formalism to the work of these predecessors. The resulting works are elegant sculptures that vacillate between a modernist aesthetic and an unconventional materiality.
Anneke Eussen’s new body of work focuses on redefining existing borders in a place where amalgamation is inevitable. Growing up in a Dutch town neighbouring Germany and Belgium, Eussen questions the idea of borders by mixing, overlapping, and reusing materials, creating a new, hybrid form.
For The Labyrinth, Eussen will present a new selection of installations and sculptures showing her interest in space and the way we interact with it. Eussen resorts to recuperated glass strips and panes to create map-like shapes and imaginary territories. The tension of outlining and claiming spaces are in dialogue with the surfaces invading these maps. With these new works Anneke Eussen brings awareness to small and large scale changes while raising the question on how to include individuality in a global concept.
The Labyrinth,
An ode to repetitive actions, mappings and measuring instruments.
Within my work I embrace repetitive actions, ambiguous imagery and materials in transformation. I simply find true beauty and uniqueness in the continuation of time.
Most of the selected materials in this show have a historical background, they have grown out of their original use and purpose. There are antique window panes from canal houses in Amsterdam, there are steel window frames from the Royal Dutch Braat factory, there is marble from historical buildings in Berlin and glass from a small kitchen cabinet. The materials embody a captured energy from passed times.
My artistic action consciously reinterprets and constructs the unfolded quality of these materials in current times, opening a new perspective towards the future.
Visualizing the circular movement of time passing connects to the idea of walking a labyrinth. The labyrinth has an unambiguous route to its center and back. A labyrinth is used for walking meditation, it presents no navigational challenge.
Looking upon our surrounding and built space as a Labyrinth, my current works take; action, time and space as the base for creation. Even if we choose to repeat the same things, the slightest variations are proof of growth, change and development.
Nothing happens twice, nothing is without value.
-Anneke Eussen, October 2022
Anneke Eussen (NL, 1978) lives and works in Vaals, the Netherlands. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Maastricht and finished her postgraduate at the HISK in Belgium. Recent solo exhibitions were held at DOCUMENT, Chicago (USA), Marinaro, New York (USA), Tatjana Pieters, Ghent (BE), and a duo with Bram Braam at Park Platform for Visual Arts, Tilburg (NL). In 2023 Eussen will have a solo exhibition at Kunstverein Schwerin, Schwerin (DE) and Marinaro, New York (USA). Eussen’s work is part of multiple private collections throughout Europe, North- & Latin-America. Eussen is represented by Tatjana Pieters, Ghent (BE), Marinaro, New York (USA) and DOCUMENT, Chicago (USA).
