Galleries at Auguststrasse

Galerie Deschler - Hans van Meeuwen takes a holiday. At the Deschler Gallery. At least is the current show of the 1959 born Dutchman named: Holiday. In the gallery we meet at first sight the artwork that gives the name to the show: a tent of fabric with 2 giant bird-feet placed in front of it. While we’re still considering what a weird bird this might be, we continue looking around further and see a group of swans flying out of the wall, flying watchful and somewhat skeptical onto us funny two-legged creatures. Further in the gallery we see branches growing out of the wall, a collection of oversized molars, a series of little bird-houses with giant colorful beaks, a one-legged cardboard box and a man-lost nose.

Although he received an academic education, van Meeuwen let his fantasy and irony play around freely, making high level hoaxes, loving to confuse and insecure the viewer. Several drawings fulfill this weird collection of things. They rather tangle the viewer furthermore than that they are in any way explanatory. What van Meeuwen has built together out of hardware-store materials are always details and fragments. And they are always lost from their natural realms or their natural contexts. They are absurd the way they are and they stimulate the viewer’s fantasy towards daring capers. They give way to new interpretations again and again. One would finally ask himself that the deeper sense of all things is just non-sense.

Cute, cute. And after purchase one can even carry it all home. The prices vary between Eur 450 and Eur 7,500. The flight of swans all together costs Eur 12,000 and each of the drawings can be yours for Eur 325.

Welt, 2002, by Veit Stiller