Woody van Amen | Museum Beelden aan Zee | Beeldhouwkunst in Den Haag
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Woody van Amen

2 March - 13 May 2018

Woody van Amen

Time Capsules

Woody van Amen (Rotterdam, 1936) is one of the rare Dutch artists who belonged to the country's Pop Art movement. In the early 1960s he left for the United States in search of creative freedom and was introduced to artists who used everyday products from the consumer society, like Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg. Van Amen became inspired and started lustfully assembling found objects. Typical recurring forms in his oeuvre are the silhouette of the Matterhorn in Switzerland and a form he refers to as the 'taxat', several stacked equilateral crosses.

Highlight of this exhibition are Van Amen's Time Capsules, twenty 'frozen' still lifes under a perspex cover. Every still life shows a whole new world such as a tropical island, a futuristic city or a polar bear at the North Pole. Because of their abstract elements or their titel, some Capsules bear a more poetic message; a fine example is The capitulation of Equality, representing the relationship between man and woman.

During the exhibition, the documentary Woody van Amen - Time Capsules will be on display at the Cinema aan Zee. In this short documentary, filmmaker Pascale Korteweg takes the viewer to the workshop in Kralingen where Van Amen has been working since the 1960's, allowing a peak into the artist's universe.