1st May up to and including 29th May 2016
We like to invite you to the duo exhibition of Anna Carlgren & Durk Valkema. The official opening will be on Sunday 1st May from 15h00 until 19h00. The artists will be present at the opening.
Anna Carlgren
Anna Carlgren makes non-technical instruments, which multiply, enlarge, reduce, absorb, and partly or fully deform the environment. She uses (and misuses) glass and its optical qualities in order to create a visual play.
Anna works with the effects produced by light in combination with glass. Recent work consists of sculptures with trompe l’œil and optical phenomena as a vital component that are included in a number of museum collections worldwide like the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, Sweden and Corning Museum of Glass, New York.
In 2003-2004 Anna was awarded Le Grand Atelier des Sculpteurs de l’Académie Royal des Beaux Arts in Paris for the series Do You See What I See? in which visitors and their experiences of space are central to the work. Through minimal interventions in public space the impossible is made visible, though sometimes just for a moment.
Anna is the President of The Glass Academy and head of its Commission for Knowledge Transfer, the curator of The Sybren Valkema Archive, and co-founder of The Free Glass foundation (VRIJ GLAS) a glass laboratory for artists, designers and architects with studios in the Amsterdam harbor area (www.vrijglas.org).
Durk Valkema
Durk Valkema, born 1951, is living in Amsterdam. He attended the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. After graduation in 1975 he became a student at the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague with prof. Stanislav Libensky and Jaroslava Brichtova. Today, he operates in many venues, from the design and execution of his own sculptural works to engineering energy efficient glass systems and equipment for schools, studio artists in Europe, the pacific region and the U.S. He works with both hot and cold glass to analyze the architectonic principles of form and to develop kinetic illusive games of light and shadow.
Recent work consists of large volumes of cast clear and coloured glass, composed and melted by himself. He tells people that he is a trained artist and an untrained engineer, and he finds it ironic that he has spend so much of his life involved in solving engineering problems. But the fact is, being able to think like an artist makes you a very rare kind of an engineer. Valkema: ‘As artists–people who are inspired by visions of the possible, who are fundamentally creative, who are skilled with tools and materials–we must continue to adopt smart and creative solutions to ensure the use of glass as a free and independent medium in the arts in the 21st century.’
