About Color

working on site

May 4th to June 23rd, 1996

Introduction: Gudrun Thiessen-Schneider. 

Lecture: Michael Bette, “Red. Aspects of a Primary Color”.

Artist talk with Piet Dirkx and Irene Veenstra, Eindhoven.

Sarah Pelikan (1947), painter, works experimentally primarily with color in space. In doing so, she feels obliged to the conceptual tradition of modernism. The architectural conditions of the rooms of the Kunstverein allow an extension of her concept: the combination of color space and an infinite series of pictures. The painter sees the rooms as consisting of three layers and defines them through blue and red. Blue for the rear wall, red for the middle wall and blue for the front. The colored walls are traversed by bands of color consisting of individual irregular quadrangular colored surface pictures. The architecturally given insights and views create seemingly endless series of pictures. A new (color) space, a room painting is created.
In the rooms of the Kunstverein she realizes her first large room work.

Piet Dirkx (1950), Dutch sculptor and painter, works with the morphology of the place. His installations in museums or galleries are temporary and site-specific. The construction of his colored objects and installations resembles the creation of a sculpture. The succession of adding, stacking, fanning and structuring the elements determines volume, space and interspace. Simultaneously and continuously Piet Dirkx applies basic principles of painting, which he - knowing the tradition of a De Stijl well - always breaks through. His means of expression are color, its carriers and the morphologically existing contexts of the places. In the Kunstverein he works on the courtyard and the façade, reacting to their forms, light and colors. The result is a connection between time, material and the found.

The Kunstverein has brought together both artists in an exciting project that includes the house and yard of the Kunstverein.
The connection of both artists illustrates the range of neighboring positions.

Two exhibition catalogs.

The Exhibition is supported by the companies Van der Kamp, Meinderink, Nümann, Hübe Haus, and the city of Neuenhaus and the state of Niedersachsen.