For our third participation in Art Düsseldorf Dürst Britt & Mayhew is proud to present a solo exhibition by Dutch artist Lennart Lahuis. Concurrently he has a solo exhibition in Museum Schloss Moyland in Bedburg-Hau, where his work enters into dialogue with works by Joseph Beuys.
Lennart Lahuis has a strong interest in the fleeting and disposable nature of images and texts. He deploys a wide variety of techniques and materials to transform his chosen subjects into meditations on time, temporality and transience.
Central in the booth will be a group of crates containing clay fragments, which seem to be randomly inscribed with words and sentences. These fragments however originate from Lahuis’ work ‘Two-stage opening of the Dover Strait and the origin of Island Britain’, which he first presented in 2018. On giant clay tablets, the artist imprinted an enlarged version of a 2017 scientific article from Nature Communications describing the long erosion process that cut the United Kingdom from mainland Europe over the course of thousands of years. The tablets consisted of the same clay as the sea bottom of the Dover Strait. Whenever the work was presented, a constant flow of water ran over the tilted tablets, creating a new erosion that progressively rendered the text and figures of the article illegible. Scientific jargon detailing geological processes, as well as landscape and seabed formation, thus suffered actual erosion. This had a clear political significance, as the United Kingdom was then drifting away from mainland Europe due to Brexit. The clay fragments, which also fill one wall of the booth, give the viewer the feeling as if entering an archeological site and of having to put the pieces back together again to make sense of things.
This feeling is enhanced by a series of burnt photographs. During a May 1st gathering in 2023, Lahuis took to the streets of Brussels. The result is the work ‘Pressing Issues’ (2024), consisting of various photographs from that day. What is visible is a multitude of paraphernalia: the various signs, balloons, the lighters and wallets that are on offer, but also the multitude of leaflets that show a plethora of left-wing political ideologies. Banners are held individually, no longer as a crowd. Lahuis proceeded to coat these images with an emulsion so that they could be burned yet remain somewhat legible. Their semi-disintegration seems to mirror the factionalising of the left as a political movement.
Additionally several dials from Lahuis’ astronomical clock ‘Astromelancholia’ will be on view. This clock connects various contemporary images with the course of the planets in our solar system. The photographic images that are shown in relation to this clock are cut in four concentric circles and contain marks that make it possible to use them as functional dials from which astronomical information can be read when mounted on the mechanism. When attached to the clock the image will only return to its original starting position in 18,6 years. The clock itself is on view at Museum Schloss Moyland until 26 May 2024.
Lennart Lahuis (NL, 1986) received his BFA from Artez Institute of the Arts in Zwolle, Netherlands. From 2011 to 2013 he was a resident at De Ateliers in Amsterdam.
Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Earth Fire Water Air’ at Museum Schloss Moyland, Germany (2024), 'Those Hours That Have Lost Their Clock' at Galeria Jaqueline Martins in Brussels, BE (2022); ‘ With Sighs Too Deep For Words’ at Durst Britt & Mayhew (2022), 'Constant Escapement' at the Fries Museum in Leeuwarden, NL (2019); 'Land Slides' at the National Museum of Ceramics Princessehof in Leeuwarden, NL (2019). Recent group exhibitions include ‘Into Nature - Time Horizons’ in Borger-Odoorn, NL (2023), ‘River of Rebirth’ at Z33 in Hasselt, BE (2023), ‘Carrozone’ at ARCADE in Brussels, BE (2022), ’Voorlopers’ at Paleis Soestdijk in Baarn, NL (2022), 'In the Age of Post-Drought' at CID Grand-Hornu in Boussu, BE (2021), 'CODA Paper Art' at CODA Museum in Apeldoorn, NL (2021), 'When stones Awake' at Platform POST in Nijmegen, NL (2021).
In 2021 Lahuis won the FPT Sustainable Art Award at Artissima in Turin, Italy and in 2015 the Royal Award for Contemporary Painting as well as the Piket Art Prize, both in the Netherlands. His work is held in private and public collections, including the Fries Museum in Leeuwarden, Stedelijk Museum Schiedam in Schiedam, Museum Schloss Moyland, Akzo Nobel Art Foundation, the collection of the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam, ING collection, and the moraes-barbosa collection in São Paulo.
