themes (flower and fruit still lifes), to modern interpretations of the vanitas symbols (constructions with objects that refer to our everyday surroundings) to nearly abstract, three-dimensional still lifes in the exhibition space. Photography in the Netherlands has In 2011 Foam is celebrating its tenth had a tradition of experimenting with anniversary. The museum first opened staged photography since the 1970s. its doors in 2001 with the Dutch Delight The still life has also been a major theme exhibition, taking ‘Dutch Light’ as its in this tradition. Exaggeration and central subject. It was a typically Dutch enlargement are devices which originat­ historical art theme, for which Dutch ed from advertising and much of the painting is famous the world over. Now, staged photography of that time was Still/ in Still/Life – Contemporary Dutch inspired by conceptual as well as adver­ Photography, Foam has put together tising photography. an exhibition comprised of work by Many of the photographers in this Dutch photographers giving surprising exhibition also work at this juncture. interpretations of another classic They move easily between established subject in Dutch art history: the still life. art institutions, the editorial world of The still life could be considered magazines and publications, and the a composition of lifeless, impassive commercial advertising sphere. A clear, Life objects. Although the Romans painted recognisable style can be seen in both the first still lifes, the genre mainly their personal and their commercial became known through 17th-century work, such as that of so-called ‘Dutch Dutch and Flemish paintings. These Design’ which alludes to a typically paintings can often be categorised by Dutch design aesthetic: minimalist, Contemporary subject: still lifes with flowers, still lifes experimental, innovative, unconventional of food on richly laid-out tables and and with humour. vanitas still lifes illustrating the transient The flower still lifes by Scheltens & Dutch nature of earthly life. Thousands of Abbenes are close to being intoxicating. people still enjoy this art every day The intense colours seduce the viewer in museums such as the Rijksmuseum and pull one into the image. They are Photography in Amsterdam and the Mauritshuis more explicit than 17th-century still lifes, in The Hague. in which the painters gathered their For a diverse group of contemporary floral bouquets from far and wide, and photographers, the Dutch still life from various seasons as well – idealised remains a source of inspiration, but with bouquets that could never have really a modernised and updated concept existed. But Scheltens & Abbenes never in a contemporary visual language. The try to pull the wool over our eyes. The Potatoes series by Anuschka Blommers strong two-dimensionality and graphic and Niels Schumm, for example, is far quality reveal that what we see here from classic, but instead starkly graphic is a constructed bouquet. The work of – and due to its subject matter also very Scheltens & Abbenes deals with the Dutch. The works on view in the exhibi­ medium of photography itself, just as tion range from those based on classic most of the other work in the exhibition. For Fake Flowers in Full Colour (2009), and presentation of rising talents. Lernert & Sander, Charlott Markus, working on their own, trained in the Jaap Scheeren and Hans Gremmen Young talent is also a major area of Katja Mater, Krista van der Niet, Netherlands, who are also influential bought some fake flowers and paint interest in Foam’s collection. Jaap Scheeren & Hans Gremmen, and working innovatively internationally. and took a photo of this bouquet. The Still/Life – Contemporary Dutch Scheltens & Abbenes, Diana Scherer, Their work is, in both form as well as in They then broke down the image into Photography exhibition was not created Johannes Schwartz, Ingmar Swalue, visual language, extremely important four colour separations: cyan, magenta, at the curator’s desk but arose from Marianne Vierø, Anne de Vries and for current developments in photography. yellow and black. They placed the many intriguing talks in the studios Qiu Yang. These conversations, insights, bouquets in these four colours in the of Melanie Bonajo, Kim Boske, discussions and the enthusiasm studio again and re-photographed Blommers & Schumm, Elspeth Diederix, that emerged from them led to this them. In theory, if these images were Fleur van Dodewaard, Uta Eisenreich, exhibition. It shows that striking laid over each other, the archetypal Peggy Franck, Marnix Goossens, and innovative developments can be image would be recreated. It is interest­ Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky, Paul Kooiker, seen in the field of art photography. ing to observe how the duo plays with Anouk Kruithof, Yvonne Lacet, There is a large group of photographers our belief in photography as a faithful reproduction of reality and with colour as an essential component of this. The photos seen in Still/Life are no longer ‘taken’ (as an imprint of reality), but are ‘made’ (staged and composed in their entirety). Subject and object converge and exist only in relation to each other. Whether the final result is purely a photo, a video or an installation, in all cases the form and the content have been entirely orchestrated by the creator. The photographers enter into relationships with other expressions of visual art in constructing their images, such as performance, video, installation and sculpture. Anne de Vries and Peggy Franck play an ingenious game with two–dimensionality and 3D, expanding their photos into the physical space. For them as well, the process and the experiment in the studio are of the utmost importance. Young talent has been a key focus in Foam’s exhibition policy since the museum was founded. The new gradu­ ates showing their work in Foam 3h, exhibitions by young photographers already further along in their careers, the Foam Paul Huf Award (the annual prize for photographers under 35) and the yearly Talent edition of Foam Magazine are essential for the discovery

“A laden brush, in depositing paint painting, certain words and phrases recur: and a tiny skeleton inside a glass dome, The photographic still life has come on the panel or canvas, hardly ‘holy’, ‘poetic’, ‘calm’, ‘meditative’. every object weighted with allegorical a long way since then, while essentially registers a sound, and how great is In still life painting, there is order and calm­ meaning. Here, photography, for all its remaining – until relatively recently, the peace palpable in those great ness even in death. A human skull sits modernist thrust, is realist painting’s poor when conceptualism came into play – artists of stillness: Vermeer, at the centre of Harmen Steenwyk’s classic relation. The new, potentially revolutionary essentially the same. If I was asked, Chardin, Hammershoi.” 17th century still life, An Allegory of the medium has not yet realised its potential off the top of my head, to list the masters Vanities of Human Life, one of the greatest or its power, but remains tied to an older of the form, the names Roger Fenton, This quote is taken from Open City of the ‘Vanitas’ paintings that so en­ realist tradition that it will soon threaten to Edward Steichen, Eugene Atget, (Faber & Faber, 2010), a long, discursive thralled the collective Calvinist imagination render obsolete. Paul Outerbridge, Edward Weston, novel in which the narrator walks around of post-Reformation Netherlands. In its earliest manifestations, the still Tina Modotti, Paul Strand, Josef Sudek, New York, meditating on, among other Bathed in a ray of opaque light, Steenwyk’s life photograph was literally an experiment Andre Kertesz, Irving Penn and things, mortality, culture, race, the discon­ perfectly rendered skull is an example in capturing stillness. The long length of Robert Mapplethorpe would come to mind. nect­edness of modern urban life and, of religious allegory writ large; an object time of an exposure meant that the subject For all of them, to one degree or briefly, the consolations of great art from that does not need much scholarly had to be fixed, inanimate, utterly still. another, the still life was a way of creating another older, seemingly simpler time. elucidation amidst an array of other more Stillness was a prerequisite, not just an images of arranged beauty that relied In art, as in life, stillness denotes peace. earthly things (a shell, a sword, a jar, end result. Duboscq’s Vanitas photograph heavily on pre–production: the setting up The profound sense of stillness that Cole’s silk fabric, books, musical instruments), is a study in shades of grey except for and lighting of a group of diverse or 21st century flaneur describes is palpable, all of which have been carefully chosen for the ghostly wash of opaque pink light that related inanimate objects. Within those im­ not just within a painting by Vermeer their more coded metaphorical resonances. seems caught inside the dome. In its almost posed limitations, there was much or Chardin or Hammershoi (the stilled life), And yet, despite its stark message monochromatic aspect, it seems altogether room for mischief, experiment and but without it, too – in the space occupied (‘Do not store up for yourself treasures less ‘real’ in some ways than Steenwyck’s provocation, as Man Ray’s Surrealist still by the reverent viewer (stilled by art into on earth…’ Matthew 6:18), and its intention photorealist painting and exudes that lifes attest. In the 1930s, Outerbridge quiet contemplation). to provoke guilt or self-recrimination, strange sense of historical ‘thenness’ that made still life photographs that blurred The calmness that comes off a Vermeer Steenwyck’s skull painting is a work of old photographs often carry. the traditional boundaries between interior – or a ‘breakfast’ painting by supreme stillness. In its understated way, Ironically, though, early photographic the commercial – advertising, editorial Pieter Claesz or an ornate tableau of fruit it insists on a degree of silent reflection still lifes were perceived by the public commissions for interior decoration and vegetables by Willem Kalf – is tangible by the viewer. Some of its quiet power rests, to be so real that they had to have been magazines– and the artistic. In the 198Os, in any room, however crowded, in which of course, on its formal beauty and on created by practiced masters of illusion: Penn made formally beautiful still lifes these works are exhibited. Outside of Steenwyck’s ability to render his subject in fine artists adept in paintbrush and pencil. out of blocks of frozen fruit as well as using a church or a monastery, I have not experi­ a way that is almost photorealist in its In 1846, when William Henry Fox Talbot the sordid detritus of everyday life, enced the kind of reverent silence that detail and in its capturing of light and published the first installment of what is including cigarette butts picked up from I felt when walking through the recent retro­ shade and texture. now considered to be the first commercially the New York streets, then artfully spective of Vilheim Hammershoi’s It is interesting, then, to contrast produced photographic book, he called it, arranged and lit in the studio. His crumpled paintings of muted interiors at the Royal Steenwyck’s great Vanitas painting with revealingly and a little defensively, and filthy fag ends might seem the Acadamey of Arts in London in 2010. one of the earliest photographic The Pencil of Nature. He also included antithesis of the traditional still life except This was a silence – a stillness – of a different daguerreotypes ever created: Louis Jules a short written insert to reassure his readers for the care and attention he gave to order than the usual murmur of appre­ Duboscq’s Still Life with Skull (1850). that what they were buying was indeed their formal composition. ciation (or, indeed, reverent bemusement) Roughly two hundred years separate them, an example of the new art form called One of the bigger questions that that holds sway in our often-imposing but they are essentially the same in photography: “The plates of the present­ echoes through the history of still life temples of culture, where people tend to terms of their core composition and their work are impressed by the agency of Light photography­ concerns what is now referred behave as they have been conditioned allegorical message. alone, without any aid whatever from to as pre–production: is the still life to behave when they confront officially Created by a pioneering inventor and the artist’s pencil. They are the sun–pictures a way to control in advance the end result; canonised works of art. maker of optical instruments, Still Life themselves, and not, as some persons to try to take any element of chance It is perhaps not surprising, then, With Skull is a photograph that utilises the have imagined, engravings in imitation.” – or even instinct – out of the photographic that, when art historians or critics address tropes of Vanitas still life paintings. The equation? Some still life photographs, the work of the great masters of still life skull sits alongside an hourglass, a crucifix though, are discovered rather than arranged. Is William Eggleston’s photograph of row one could also ask: does the range of both painterly and photographic, is still but altogether different. It may make you of toy dolls sitting on the hood of a car contemporary still life photography a recognisable touchstone, as well as think that, in a time of visual overload, a still life? Or, his most famous photograph, on display here comprise a definable Dutch modern minimalist design, and every kind in which everyone is now a photographer Greenwood Mississippi, 1973, the famous genre or even a movement? If so, does of conceptual practice, from elaborately and/or a curator, old terms are shedding ‘red ceiling’ that, in its heightened every­ that genre or movement adhere more to staged photographs to installations. their meanings and old definitions are dayness, almost vulgar colours, seems the formal characteristics of modern Post-production, it almost goes without being pushed beyond their limits. to fly in the face of the formal conventions Dutch design – minimalism, functionality, saying, is now as important as pre- This is where we live now, but the still life, of the still life? Neither, interestingly, a slight hint of stylistic mischief? production. The still life can now be ‘stilled’ stretched, reinvented, subverted, somehow give off a sense of stillness, but, like many Or, is the work shown here too diverse to after as well as before, and even during. endures. Still… Eggleston images, are oddly menacing, be labelled ‘Dutch still life photography’? This is still life, then, in – and of – even deathly. (Or, as the curators mischievously put it, the digital age: the same as it ever was, Sean O'Hagan These questions of definition and Dutch Still/Life photography?). interpretation resound in an altogether There is a world of difference, more restrained way through the work for instance, between, the Pop aesthetic of the young artists selected for Still/Life of Anne de Vries’s colour photograph, – Contemporary Dutch Photography Eye Candy, and the shadowy, fetishistic, alongside a host of even more tricky black and white, human still lifes of questions thrown up by the elastic nature Paul Kooiker; between the created of many of the images. There are plates ‘characterless blankness’ of Yvonne of fruit here, as well as isolated apples and Lacet’s photographed paper sculptures pristine potatoes, all of which reference of ghost cities and Melanie Bonajo’s series, the formalism of Dutch design, the almost Furniture Bondage, which speaks of unreal ‘cleanness’ of the digital image, female subjugation in an often surreally- but do not speak of the wider society in the humorous, but unsettling way. way that still lifes once did. There is a series Let us consider too how the traditional of slow motion studies by Lernett & Sander informs the post–modern: vegetables, of eggs being demolished by a hammer flowers, and fruit all feature here, but as and, even a detonated champagne cork, often unreal or, in one instance, deathly which shows how the worlds of fine art objects – Krista van der Niet’s unearthly and advertising – and pop video and film Black Fruit. Is this a contemporary­ Vanitas design – have converged. (Are they still life or a simulacrum of the same? almost-still lifes?) Uta Eisenreich manages to make an Can a video installation or a slow motion utterly contemporary – and witty – stereo film somehow be a still life? Is the term image that alludes to the breakfast still life now used to describe a means to an and flower paintings of the 17th Century as end rather than an end itself? Is the still well as the detached, almost mundane life now just one of many available strategies style of certain contemporary photo­ deployed in the production of an graphers of the everyday such as Nigel installation or an elaborately staged photo­ Schafran. Irving Penn, in one sense, graph? Is the still life yet another older form would approve, both of the compositional that can be appropriated, or even sampled, skill and the juxtaposition of seemingly to make work that tramples all over random objects like a hammer, a slice of the notion of tradition? Does the term still cake and a dice. Here the compositional life actually mean anything anymore chance meetings of the Surrealists are other than in an art-historical context? rendered in a minimal and deadpan way. More pertinently for this show, For all that, the traditional still life,

Still Life with Flowers and Watch (Videostill), 2011 © Katja Mater

Potato, 2003 A, 2009 © Uta Eisenreich © Blommers & Schumm

Plate RG, 2009 © Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky Melon, 1997 © Marnix Goossens

Fruit, 2008 © Krista van der Niet

A publication by Foam © 2011 Still Life (Milk), 2002 © Elspeth Diederix This publication has been produced in conjunction with the exhibition Still/Life – Eye Candy, 2007 © Anne de Vries Contemporary Dutch (with Janis Pönisch) Photography

Curator Foam Colette Olof Fake Flowers in Full Color, 2009 © Jaap Scheeren & Hans Gremmen Introduction text Collection of Sleepings and Foam Awakenings, 2003 © Kim Boske Bouquet I, 2005 Essay © Scheltens & Abbenes Sean O'Hagan writes about photography for the Guardian Flowerfield, 2009 – 2011 and the Observer. He has © Diana Scherer been awarded the 2011 J Dudley Johnston award from the Hanna, 2007 © Melanie Bonajo Royal Photographic Society "for major achievement in the field of photographic criticism". Crush # 1, 2009 © Paul Kooiker Design Vandejong Nude Study # 2, 2010 © Fleur Van Dodewaard Print robstolk ® Even Gun Metal Gray has Paper a shade of Blue, 2006 Spill 3, 2009 © Ingmar Swalue Maxi Gloss 135g © Marianne Vierø (with Mik Zandijk)

Winkel # 3, 2007 Installation view (detail), 2011 Publisher © Johannes Schwartz © Charlott Markus Foam Amsterdam www.foam.org Stable State, Video still, 2010 Balancing Orange, Pink and © Anouk Kruithof Yellow, 2007 © Qiu Yang With thanks to Ministry of Foreign Affairs Movements of a City, 2010 P.O. box 20061 © Yvonne Lacet 2500 EB The Hague Elektrotechnique, Video still, 2011 The Netherlands © Lernert & Sander www.minbuza.nl

Foam is supported by the VandenEnde Foundation, the BankGiro Loterij and De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek.

176,140211, 2011 © Peggy Franck � Anouk Kruithof (NL,1981) Still/ anoukkruithof.nl

Life Yvonne Lacet (NL,1980) yvonnelacet.nl

Lernert Engelberts (NL,1977)

Contemporary & Sander Plug (NL,1969) Dutch lernertandsander.com Charlott Markus (SWE,1974) Photography charlottmarkus.com

Katja Mater (NL,1979) katjamater.nl Melanie Bonajo (NL,1978) melaniebonajo.com Krista van der Niet (NL,1978) kristavanderniet.nl Kim Boske (NL,1978) kimboske.com Jaap Scheeren (NL,1979) & Hans Gremmen (NL,1976) Anuschka Blommers (NL,1969) jaapscheeren.nl & Niels Schumm (NL,1969) hansgremmen.nl blommers-schumm.com Maurice Scheltens (NL,1972) Elspeth Diederix (KEN,1971) & Liesbeth Abbenes (NL,1970) elspethdiederix.com scheltens-abbenes.com

Fleur Van Dodewaard (NL,1983) Diana Scherer (DE,1971) fleurvandodewaard.com dianascherer.nl

Uta Eisenreich (DE,1971) Johannes Schwartz (DE,1970) hier-eisenreich.org johannesschwartz.com

Peggy Franck (NL,1978) Ingmar Swalue (NL,1970) publicnature.nl ingmarswalue.com

Marnix Goossens (NL,1967) Marianne Vierø (DK,1979) marnixgoossens.com marianneviero.com

Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky (CH,1980) Anne de Vries (NL,1977) kovacovsky.com annedevries.info

Paul Kooiker (NL,1964) Qiu Yang (PRC,1981) paulkooiker.com qiu-yang.com