Artist: Nel Aerts
Exhibition title: Jack and The Paradise Cruise
Venue: Horizont Gallery, Budapest, Hungary
Date: October 6 – November 9, 2016
Photography: Dávid Biró, all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Horizont Gallery
“My solo exhibition Jack and the Paradise Cruise brings together a series of new self portraits. All the drawings and collages were made during a recent stay at Casa Lina. Casa Lina is a holiday house of a friend of mine. It is located on the top of a mountain in Arenas, Andalusia. Over the past years numerous colleague artists and friends have stayed and worked there. All one does while staying at Casa Lina is swim, draw, eat, drink and sleep. The only reason to leave the house and go down the mountain is to buy more food and drink. Jack and the Paradise Cruise documents my Spanish Paradise Cruise.” Nel Aerts
NEl AERTS (born 1987, Antwerp) focuses on an intermedial versus a (semi-)iconic way of handling materials and media. Furthermore, she observes how the position of the artist is represented by the world. In her drawings, paintings, performative videos and sculptural installations she questions how various media, artistic calling and the world relate, using a mix of tragedy, poetry, fiction, humour and art historical references. The caricatures Aerts presents in her work reflect on reality and sometimes mock the role or expectations that are projected onto a young artist. They bear the consequences of contradictions: they drink, they are sad, lonely, timid, and on the other hand, they are also funny.
Humour, loneliness, sadness, taboo, escapism, the journey, the boat trip, optimism, the mask/masquerade—all of these are elements that recur in her paintings, drawings, collages, sculptures and actions. At the same time her practice and work also bear witness to a stubborn faith in the creative, material and moving powers of contemporary art.
Nel Aerts is represented by the Carl Freedman Gallery in London. Her works have been presented at international art institutions like the Kunsthalle Wien, the Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo, the Kunstraum in London and at Wiels in Brussels. Her works are also present at many prestigious art fairs including Art Brussels, Armory Show in New York or the Liste in Basel.
