• LET'S WONDER OVER YONDER
  MARIJN AKKERMANS
• MARCH 3 – APRIL 7, 2007 
•  

OPENING RECEPTION: SATURDAY 3 MARCH 17.00 HRS.

AMSTERDAM, 23 December 2006 – From 3 March to 7 April 2007 Galerie Gabriel Rolt will be presenting new works on paper by Marijn Akkermans (Nijmegen, 1975). Akkermans confronts the viewer with ambivalent mental images in which dreams and nightmares, heroes and villains, play and drama merge.  

"As you get older," says Akkermans, "the world seems smaller. Both physically and mentally. Experiences cease to be new, the world seems to contract." But somebody entering Akkermans' world cannot but see it through the eyes of a child. In life-size works on paper, he takes us back to suppressed desires and fears in which nothing is what it seems. We do not know whether we can trust that smiling nurse, or that older man in whose coat we bury our head. And what about that skinny mother who seems to be filled with teddy-bear stuffing? Our "adult" notions about good and evil have no relevance here; we can find no solace in certainties, and what has replaced them is enlarging experience. Not to mention a smile, because a longer look at Akkermans' work reveals the underlying humour in it.
"I am interested in the phenomenon of fear," he explains. "The feeling that you cannot ascribe one clear meaning to things and that you have no control. We think that we are adults, but how true is that? It is through that perspective that the humour comes into my work, albeit pulling no punches."
What makes Akkermans' drawings so appealing is the enormous virtuosity and versatility of his technique. The striking combination of transparent and apparently innocent coloured pencil drawings with jet-black silhouettes in paint and lacquer, and sometimes collage as well, only serves to underline the ambivalence of his work.

Akkermans studied at the School of Arts in Arnhem and the Dutch Art Institute in Enschede after which he practiced a working period at Schloss Ringenberg in Germany. He exhibited in a.o. GEM in The Hague, the Ausstellungshalle für Zeitgenössische Kunst Münster (together with a.o. Karen Kilimnik and Jonathan Meese) and his work was on show at Arco, Art Cologne and Art Basel. The Gemeentemuseum The Hague acquired his work, as well as private collectioners in o.a. the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium.