Lennart Lahuis: Frontspace: Pockets of Memory
After Lennart Lahuis’ successful solo exhibition ‘Earth Fire Water Air’ at Museum Schloss Moyland in Bedburg Hau, a solo booth at Art Düsseldorf, and our collaborative presentation at Galerie Britta Rettberg in München within the framework of Various Others, Dürst Britt & Mayhew is happy to premiere a selection of his most recent works in The Netherlands.
Central in the exhibition ‘Pockets of Memory’ is 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 the exhibition walls, 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. However, as a result of combining the fragments in a very free and personal way, Lahuis gives a poetical twist to his scientific source material
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. These specific works enter into dialogue with a poster by the artist Jacqueline de Jong (1939-2024), which she designed, printed and distributed for the 1968 Student Protests in Paris.
Recent solo exhibitions by Lennart Lahuis include ‘Earth Fire Water Air’ at Museum Schloss Moyland, DE (2024), ‘Solid Currents’ (with Paul Valentin) at Galerie Britta Rettberg in München, DE (2024), ’Those Hours That Have Lost Their Clock' at Galerie 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 ‘What would Marcel Broodthaers do? At Museum Jan Cunen in Oss, NL (2024), Schemerlicht Festival, Nijmegen (2024), ’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.
