6 Sept 2007 to 13 Oct 2007
Hours: Tue-Sat (11am-6pm)
ROBERT MANN GALLERY
210 Eleventh Avenue
Floor 10
New York, NY
NY 10001
New York
North America
p: +1 212.989.7600
m:
f: +1 212.989.2947
w: www.robertmann.com
Adler Hotel, Room 44, Sharon Springs, 2005 36 x 43 inches / 48 x 57 inches. Ed of 10 � Robert Mann Gallery / Wijnanda Deroo
Robert Mann Gallery is pleased to open the fall season with an exhibition of 16 new photographs by Dutch artist Wijnanda Deroo. Interiors will be on view from September 6 to October 13, 2007. An opening reception for the artist will be held on Thursday, September 6 from 6-8pm.
An international traveler with a camera as her companion rather than a guide book, Wijnanda Deroo explores the shared humanity imprinted upon the environments we inhabit. Her photographs, although from geographically disparate locales, including Indonesia, Berlin, the Netherlands, Puerto Rico, and Sharon Springs, New York are unified by their sumptuous colors, formal geometries, and quotidian subject matter. More so than the locations of the sites depicted, the motif or palette have defined Deroo's work across her career. What has often been termed commonplace in the photographs, may in fact be better called common places of repose. Deroo's camera settles on bedrooms, foyers, cafes and waiting rooms, familiar tableaux in which hours are passed with routine nonchalance. Yet the images never transcend time: the inescapable affect of natural light and the ubiquity of windows and doors are portals to the exterior world. While promoting ambiguities with regards to time and place, Deroo's photographs invite implicit connections between images. Taken together, the accumulated evidence and melancholic beauty become traces that "[point] to a secret, to something hidden beyond what is visible." (Perspektief #30, Rudy Kousbroek)
Wijnanda Deroo has exhibited her work internationally since the early 1980s. Her photographs are included in numerous collections, including those at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Biblioth�que Nationale, Paris; the Mus�e Nationale d'Art Moderne at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Dutch Art Foundation, Amsterdam; and the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora, Tel Aviv. Her work was recently featured in Blind Spot (Issue #23); other publications include Huizen (De Verbeelding Publishing, Amsterdam, 2003) and Wijnanda Deroo: Photographs (De Verbeelding Publishing, Amsterdam, 2002).
THE NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW It is dangerous to say an artist exhibits national tendencies, but Wijnanda Deroo's photographs are so Dutch the connection is inescapable.
As the show's title promises, she focuses on interiors. As in Vermeer's work, one of the prominent aspects of these deeply hued, expertly composed photographs is the relationship between inside and out, highlighted by windows and doors that offer glimpses of the exterior or allow light from it to cascade in.
Maps in Vermeer's paintings alluded to the world beyond the his doorstep, the one explored and colonized by the Dutch in the 17th century. Ms. Deroo's photographs record her own travels in Indonesia, the Caribbean and the United States, although from the vantage point of a traveler who never makes it off the ship or out of the hotel.
The cryptic narratives favored by Dutch masters � erotically charged music lessons, sleeping maids, people passing letters � are replaced in Ms. Deroo's unpopulated interiors by sly visual jokes and elegant formal juxtapositions. In the "Party Room," taken in Puerto Rico, there is a crudely painted mural depicting a Caribbean sunset (presumably you could witness a real one outside); a mirror in a Kansas hat store reflects the legs of the tripod and the photographer's foot.
Even Ms. Deroo's love of color feels Dutch. Her deep red rooms and a bright, multicolored Indonesian cafe update Gerrit Rietveld or Jaap Drupsteen's eye-popping designs for guilder notes.
These are intensely formalist rather than Conceptualist works, unless you consider the correspondence between images of rooms and the camera itself; the word, after all, comes from the Latin word for "chamber." And in Vermeer's day images of rooms implied the possible use of camera obscura devices. Mostly Ms. Deroo's photographs demonstrate the rewards of close looking and mining an aesthetic heritage � even one that in the abstract sounds as clich�d as Dutch interiors.
