Helen Frankenthaler
Buddha’s Court
1964
acrylic on canvas
249 cm x 239 cm
private collection Mr. and Mrs. Robert K. Hoffman
I got acquainted with Helen Frankenthaler as an art student. I had been messing around with other media for a while then, dismissing painting (on canvases especially) as too rigid and antiquated. This painting I’ve only seen in a book thus far, ‘Helen Frankenthaler: a paintings retrospective’, and yet it has enthralled me enough to keep returning to it. It is just shy of a perfect square, with an almost symmetrical layout. There is a rigidity to the work, made lighter by the inherent glow of the blues and oranges which gives it such a mystical character. My own paintings tend to be much more chaotic, but the one thing that this has in common with all of my other favourite works (be it other people’s or my own), is that it seems to hum, be alive. It is a place, a seat. As much as painting has a long, and weighty tradition behind it, there is also such a simplicity to that canvas on the wall. Within those four lines of the edges exists radical freedom. It does not conform to our natural laws of physics, of time passing. It creates its own. She is one of the painters that taught me this very juicy truth. This is indeed Buddha in his court, the painting being both a regal as well as friendly presence. Simple as that.
Barnet Newman
Cathedra
1951
oil and acrylic on canvas
243 x 543 cm
collection Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
Then there is the beloved Cathedra. Without meaning to, here we have another seat. It is linked to the biblical throne of God, and to the connection Newman felt with spirituality creating this work. Newman was not a believer in the traditional sense of the word, and neither am I honestly. I do not believe in god, but I love that feeling you get when looking at the night sky for a little too long. You get swallowed up by the thing above you that’s bigger and older. This work is monumental, it is lofty, and I find myself putting some time aside to visit every time I’m in Amsterdam. It even makes it feel slightly like a pilgrimage, but despite its loftiness I do not feel an arrogance from the work. It invites you to disappear in there for a while, join in the zips present already. There’s an incredible depth to the blue which starts to move, almost vibrate as you close the distance. You see that the blue is glowing, humming, bristling with red. You notice green bruising the space. Creeping up on you, the painting shows you just how dark yellow can get. There’s a comfort to this, to sitting with this thing that is older and does not let itself be understood completely.
Carl Fredrik Hill
Figure Composition
not dated
oil on paper mounted on canvas
49 x 64 cm
collection National Museum, Stockholm
Now to a painting I fell in love with more recently. I had the pleasure of viewing this at the Swedish Ecstacy exhibition in Bozar. Initially I was purely drawn to this exhibition because of Hilma af Klint (another one of my great loves), but, oh, the fun of falling in love with an artist previously unknown to you on top of that. Hill is known for the landscapes he painted in the early years of his career, and for the drawings of fantastical scenes he created after he became mentally ill in his late twenties. There is a great intensity and drive to him, which went unabated in the second part of his career. The strangeness in his works though, already simmering, exploded. Many of his drawings and paintings from that period tickle me in one way or another, but this is simply a work I want to bite, sink my teeth into. It’s so visceral. At the Bozar exhibition it was hung horizontally, and then while looking it up online vertically. I’m still not entirely sure which way is the right way, but both are fun to me. Horizontally it took me a little longer to figure out what was going on in the painting, while vertically? It is a landscape and it is so alive. The writhing bodies are clouds, the cock is a tower and the reclining women are babbling brooks. It touches something that is very dear to my own heart, my own inspiration: the idea of the imaginal being grounded in the material, and the aliveness of it. No either/or, but yes/and. It is such a physical and fresh example of this.
Emma Peters, 2023
Emma Peters
Eve’s Eyrie
2021
acrylic on cotton
200 x 300 cm
Emma Peters
Fecund
2022
acrylic on canvas
100 x 190 cm
Emma Peters (NL)
Untitled
2023
acrylic on canvas
50 x 60 cm
