Marijke van Warmerdam (b. Niewer-Amstel, Holland, 1959; lives and works in Amsterdam and Karlsruhe). Since the 1980's and in a unique manner, she has explored new possibilities of formal and conceptual expression combining film, video, sculpture, photography and language. "De perto à distância / Close by in the distance” is the largest retrospective exhibition of her works, organised by the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum (Rotterdam, Holland). Van Warmerdam’s oeuvre focuses the spectator’s gaze on the simple beauty of everyday life, showing us that there’s always something extraordinary in that which we might normally consider to be trivial. Marijke van Warmerdam is renowned for her short looped films, which explore the intense visuality of their motifs, creating a situation beyond the narratives that can be recounted or described. Banal everyday objects and actions thereby acquire the quality of a hypnotic spell that transform them before ordinary onlookers. Her work also encourages a new way of seeing, through the minimal interventions of her sculptures, paintings and photographic works. The extreme simplicity of these works engenders a special eloquence.
Now shown in Portugal for the first time, Marijke van Warmerdam's work has been presented in numerous international exhibitions, such as the Venice, Sydney, Berlin and Gwangju Biennales, and Documenta X in Kassel. Her works are found in the collections of numerous international colections such as the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Museum of Modern Art in Kanazawa, Japan and the Castello di Rivoli in Turin. This exhibition is curated by the well-known curator and professor Jan Debbaut, former Director of the Collections of the Tate Modern. On the occasion of this exhibition, a book about the artist will be published, with contributions by Fiona Bradley, Maarten Doorman, Philippe-Alain Michaud and Michaela Unterdörfer.Curator: Jan DebbautOrganised by: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, RotterdamCo-production: Fundação de Serralves, Porto and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam
Exhibition guide: download it here (pdf).
