Five Dutch Artists: A Selection of Contemporary Art from Holland

Serpentine South Gallery 24 Aug — 15 Sep 1974 Free

An eclectic exhibition of work in a variety of media by five artists from Holland.

In the catalogue for this exhibition, William Feaver introduced the show as the Dutch equivalent of a Serpentine Gallery summer show: “That is, they are not ‘The Dutch Scene As We See It’; but individuals who have something to say in a variety of languages.” As such, these five Dutch artists represented neither a cross section nor a particular age group.

Works in the exhibition included a selection from van den Broecke’s Dirid, which the artist described as an attempt, “to identify and correlate the relationships between a proliferation of directions, lengths, widths, and intervals.”

In Yale University Press’s 2002 collection of Richard Cork’s art criticism, Everything Seemed Possible: Art in the 1970s, Cork asserts: “…the show is catholic and deliberately diverse in its effect. Where Jules de Goede appears to focus exclusively on the possibilities offered by painted and incised canvases, Douwe Jan Bakker displays 236 Pronounceables – small wooden objects which are supposed to be held in the mouth by a thin peg, thereby enabling the holder to ‘pronounce’ a visual system. And while Cornelius Rogge uses wood, chrome, perspex, cloth, iron and plastic to make his enigmatic constructions, J. Floris van den Broecke exhibits a selection of methodical form-clusters called Dirid, made out of self-adhesive colour tape on paper.”

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