Ide André at Billytown

Artist: Ide André

Exhibition title: Just a Satisfying Spiral

Venue: Billytown, The Hague, The Netherlands

Date: March 6 – May 2, 2020

Photography: Charlott Markus and Matt King / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Billytown, The Hague

Press release: Billytown, The Hague 2 March 2020

Billytown invites its resident Ide André for a gallery takeover

Just a Satisfying Spiral is on view from March 6th till May 2nd 2020

Billytown is delighted to welcome its resident Ide André to take over the exhibition space, the gallery. Billytown reconstructs the traditional boundaries of the gallery and questions the structure and dynamics of an exhibition. Instead of a static show where the emphasis is on the opening, it researches how the period after can remain active. Thanks to Mondriaan Fund, Ide André has a six month residency period at Billytown, which started in January and will last till the summer. For his residency, André wanted to collaborate with external partners in regards to his research. Just a Satisfying Spiral is a prolongation and opening up of his residency. The programme is not a conclusion to his research, rather it is an extension. Collaboration and dynamism are core characteristics of Billytown, and with that we are looking forward to the programming that will happen in the exhibition space: a mixture of an ever-changing exhibition, events, and extension of the studio. The programming will start on March 6 during Hoogtij #60 with an ongoing performance ‘Swoopy Shake, Silver Snake’ by Broken Toaster Records (a performance collective in which Andre takes part) between 19.00 and 23.00hrs.

In his residency, André works from a new starting point, taking the striking image of the spiral as a pictorial reference. Whereas in former works like his rope series, where he used rope as a physical and performative element to create his paintings, André’s focal point now fixates on the visual rather than the material. He consciously subverts his previous methods and specifically explores how the work changes when beginning from the image. This programming investigates the methods of the artist; when the starting point of the artist’s process shifts away from the material and physical, does this change the nature of the work itself? Several events concerning this theme will be programmed throughout the residency period. This takes the research outside of the studio and instead opens it up to encourage reciprocity, resembling the dynamics of collaboration in Billytown itself. It is in Billytown’s nooks and corners, where chance encounters might occur, that meaning is created.

André creates his spirals moving in a clockwise manner, working in one action, dripping paint out of the bottles. He describes his process of drawing out the spiral as following the kick of a beat. The painting takes the lead and it is the rhythm that defines his style. Music hums a low and constant tune in André’s work whilst Broken Toaster Records also explicitly create music in the spaces in conjunction with the art. For André, “the act of doing is important.” This action leaves the viewer with the imprint of his movement and these paintings offer up a striking collision of performance and imagery. The primary focus on the pictorial reference, so radically different from the action of the performative element, lies at the core of André’s residency. These works now define André’s research, but this may change over time. As he delves deeper into the image of the spiral, more of his research will be opened to the public and events will embody this spirit of the process at Billytown.

Ide André (1990, NL) lives and works in Arnhem. In 2015 he graduated from ArtEZ Arnhem, the performance department. In 2018 André was awarded with the Sieger White Award by the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds. André’s work has been shown in several exhibitions in the Netherlands, recently at Gerhard Hofland Gallery in Amsterdam, and internationally and has been acquired by a number of collections, including De Groen Fine Art Collection, Province Gelderland Art Collection and MAL Collection.

Ongoing performance ‘Swoopy Shake, Silver Snake’ by Broken Toaster Records during the opening March 6th 2020 Photo ©Matt King