For the Dialogue section of Artissima 2020 Dürst Britt & Mayhew proposes a duo exhibition by Lennart Lahuis and Willem Hussem.
Lennart Lahuis (1986) has a strong interest in the fleeting and disposable nature of images and representation. In order to slow down the viewer’s gaze his works constantly seem to hover on the verge of ephemerality. Within his artistic practice he aims to delay the process of direct access to visual information. He wants to appeal to the imagination of imagery instead of displaying images as such. Thereto he deploys unusual materials such as water on concrete and beeswax on photography, which lend his works a transformative appearance. He even stretches his imagery so far as to burn it and then painstakingly restore it again. He thus confronts the viewer with the apparent interchangeability of images within our society and the active role she has in sustaining or changing this.
Artist and poet Willem Hussem (1900-1974) continually experimented and produced highly diverse works of art, including painting, drawing and sculpture. A constant aspiration towards simplicity and purity underlies his entire oeuvre. It was in Hegel’s philosophy and Zen Bhuddism that he found the intellectual basis for the universalistic outlook on the world that would determine his thought and work. Throughout his life Hussem was in search of a manner of working that tied in with his philosophical views. In poetry, he found this in short lyrics, while in art he initially found it in a style that steered a middle path between expressionism and constructivism, and finally in geometrical abstraction.
