Description

A comprehensive illustrated monograph on the work of Dutch visual artist Jan van de Pavert, with texts by the artist and art critic Mark Kremer.

Jan van de Pavert. Collected Works is a richly illustrated body of work covering the artist’s oeuvre of the past years. Initially, Van de Pavert became known for his sculptures, his early works referred to architecture and resembled parts from buildings, such as windows and doors. An example is the 1987 work Inversion: the work is a door and doorpost folded inside out, for which an original door and doorpost were used as a mould.

Later, the artist decided to use these architectural elements in films as well and eventually started using computer animations. As this developed, he focussed more and more on murals. In an interview he justified this as follows: “I could put an entire exhibition in one film. While I was working on that, I decided to add murals to the spaces. I asked myself the question: if these spaces were covered with murals, what kind of iconography would they show? What would muralism, like Diego Rivera’s, look like in this day and age?”

A central topic in van de Pavert’s drawings is the development of figuration. He took historical paintings originating in earlier centuries as his starting point, asking himself: what do these works mean to our world right now? The themes he developed in response to this question play an important role in the publication.