Inside Outside

Bronze wood pedestal, 100 x 50 x 50 cm

Yke Prins (1961, Delft, NL) sculptures are lucid flowing forms captured in bronze. The surfaces are full of spores the signs of handling, the remains after casting of a sculpture formed from the smallest of details. Prins’ art appears to enlarge a room’s space, while her guarding sculptures seem to remain alert, conscious of the viewer’s presence. Like many traditional Dutch artists, Prins takes inspiration from the natural world movement in the sea, the wind, and light. The artist creates an abstract poetic world where the expression of her sculpture registers the force of movement and static balance. 

Lieve Prins (1948, Belgium) began studying interior design at the age of 16 and completed the Academy of Fine Arts in Breda (Holland). Later, she moved to Amsterdam to study audio and visual communication at the Film Academy, where she became involved in the anti-art theories and ‘happenings’ of the early 1970s. Her book Touch charts Prins’ career from when she found her medium in 1981, inspired by a chance observation of a child’s hand on a photocopier. Soon after, leading a self-portrait project at her daughter’s school, she one day trooped the class down to a local department store with a pocket full of change, and lifted them onto the black and white copy machine and copied away – while two pupils kept watch. She was immediately smitten by the textures and patterns that came out, as well as the ‘magical immediacy – no waiting for negatives – about the copier.  This allowed her to learn from her mistakes in a tight action-reaction loop that she found exciting.

A year later she was invited with a number of Amsterdam artists to experiment with Canon’s new colour copiers that could print on A3 paper. So came the first of many trips out to Canon headquarters at Schiphol and a corporate-artistic symbiosis that continues to this day. Her subject matter down the years has been primarily the domestic: family, love, personal objects, powdered paints, market-bought seafood, plastic sheets. Throughout, there was a richly organic, very physical presentation of her themes.

Yke Prins (1961, Delft, NL) sculpturen zijn heldere vloeiende vormen vastgelegd in brons. De oppervlakken zitten vol met sporen, de gebruikssporen, de overblijfselen na het gieten van een sculptuur gevormd uit de kleinste details. De kunst van Prins lijkt de ruimte van een kamer te vergroten, terwijl haar bewakende sculpturen alert lijken te blijven, zich bewust van de aanwezigheid van de toeschouwer. Zoals veel traditionele Nederlandse kunstenaars, haalt Prins inspiratie uit de natuurlijke wereldbeweging in de zee, de wind en het licht. De kunstenares creëert een abstracte poëtische wereld waarin de expressie van haar sculptuur de kracht van beweging en statische balans registreert.