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art &samhoud Together we build a brighter future

Index Salvador DalĂ 2 The official Michael Jackson Opus 4 Lorenzo Quinn 5 Marc Lagrange 7 Billy & Hells 8 Lotta Blokker 15 Wing Ningde 16 Margriet Smulders 19 Jeroen Buitenman 20 Gao Brothers 23 Maziar Moradi 24 Olivia Bee 26 Udo Lindenberg 31

House of Connection &samhoud’s theme is connection. We aim to inspire and connect people. But what is connection? This question has preoccupied me for years now. Being connected to yourself means knowing what you want and what you are capable of. This makes it easier to connect with other people. Connection with other people involves showing interest, being open and givingfeedback to other people. And that creates value. Accordingly, being connected with other people depends on how connected you are with yourself. You need others to learn more about yourself. That’s important to understand. Art, by its very nature, has the ability to connect. It not only inspires people, but it brings them together. Art confronts us with ourselves but simultaneously calls upon a common ground and demands from us an understanding and appreciation that reaches beyond self-interest and personal satisfaction. When looking at a work of art together, for example, we almost automatically experience connection and when we truly enter a work of art, it is as if we understand the artist’s inner world. Creativity and beauty are part of &samhoud’s DNA and we aim to encourage young and talented artists to further develop their artistic practice. The shared quality of the works we brought together at House of Connection is their underlying capacity to connect: to reveal authenticity, identity, beauty and intimacy, to inspire and to bring us together. If people are connected to each other by looking at the works of art we present at the Parkstraat, then it will greatly contribute to our higher goal: Together we build a brighter future. We achieve breakthroughs by inspiring and connecting people. Salem Samhoud

Salvador Dalí The Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí is best known for his dream-like paintings in which time, forms and space have been distorted into often realistically depicted, yet utterly bizarre images. ‘Surrealism is destructive,’ Dalí once said, ‘but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision’. A characteristic image that appears recurrently in Dalí’s art is that of the female figure converged with drawers. Greatly inspired by Sigmund Freud, Dalí wrote that ever since Freud’s invention of psychoanalysis the body can now be imagined as ‘filled with secret drawers only to be opened through psychoanalysis’. The drawers thus symbolize the mysteries and secrets of our subconscious, inner world. In the sculpture Women Aflame, the figure has burst into flames, metaphorically referring to the burning intensity of our subliminal desires. The faceless, yet beautiful female character stands for femininity as such and embodies the female mysteriousness that according to Dalí is the true source of her beauty. In his later work Dalí frequently turned to more historical and religious themes while at the same time he started to grow a fascination for nuclear physics. At a time when the world was changing quite drastically, halfway throughout the twentieth century, the artist tried to understand life by looking at science and religion. Dalí’s work on the second floor give testimony hereof; especially in Exploding Madonna we can see traces of a new artistic style he developed, which he called ‘nuclear mysticism’. Women Aﬂame Ground Floor

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The Knight Second Floor

Crucifixion Second Floor

Untitled Second Floor

Exploding Madonna Second Floor

Michael Jackson Opus Ground Floor

The official Michael Jackson Opus The Official Michael Jackson Opus, an enormous publication dedicated to the King of Pop, contains over three hundred spectacular photographs, essays and personal memoirs of those who knew Michael Jackson best. Many of the exclusive photos in the book had never been published before. The book is a grand homage to the King of Pop by those who were in close affinity with him, those with whom he worked together and who were inspired by his work.

Amongst the many contributors to the book are: reverend Jesse Jackson, Quincy Jones, Berry Gordy, Smokey Robinson, Shaquille Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Neal, Paula Abdul, John Landis, Sugar Ray Leonard, Jimmy Jam, Spike Lee, Teddy Riley, Jane Fonda.

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Lorenzo Quinn in a relationship. I see love as a continuous, eternally lasting stream of emotions. Love means appreciation, respect, honesty, trust and devotion. It means to only want what is best for the other while also loving oneself. It is an all-embracing circle of emotions in which one gives and receives without end.’

Give & Take III Second Floor

The Italian sculptor Lorenzo Quinn’s work is inspired by such masters as Michelangelo, Bernini and Rodin. In his sculptures he aims to express his innermost feelings and emotions and to convey his passion for eternal values such as love, authenticity and human connection. ‘There is no greater love than the love that grows every day, day by day,’ Quinn asserts. ‘Love is the most powerful word

art &samhoud Namib Tree Ground Floor

Marc Lagrange Evocative, sensual and voluptuous, Marc Lagrange’s work celebrates beauty and pleasure. The Antwerp-based photographer, who has a predilection for nudes and portraits, creates luxurious and timeless environments where eroticism and intimacy play a central part. The chemistry Lagrange has with his models sets him apart from other photographers. He envisages the shoot as the ultimate performance act and within a trusting climate he gets his models to lose their inhibitions in front of the camera and truly reveal themselves. With

this, the models turn into characters, echoing Lagrange’s cinematic references. However, although they bare it all, Lagrange’s women retain their sense of mystery and elusive charm. Harshness and shock, on the other hand, are absent from the photographer’s world. He favours seduction instead of sex and his images do not deal with ordinary settings or regular situations but focus on dreams and fantasies, escaping logic and the constraints of reality.

Ten Hands Staircase

Indian Girl Second Floor

Billy & Hells are the two German photographers Anke Linz and Andreas Oettingen. The duo started working together in 1987 and has since gained widespread international recognition. Initially Billy & Hells focused on fashion photography, yet by accident – forgetting to take a black and white negative out of a developer – they developed their own style and a technique now known as Lithprint. During further experimentation with different development techniques the artists discovered a method that reduces the amount of colours in a photograph while strongly intensifying the remaining colours. This resulted in the characteristic colourful style of Billy & Hells’s portraits.

Sophie Christin Ground Floor

The photos often depict different daily scenes of other people’s lives and have a serene and melancholic quality. ’All our portraits are meant as a projection field for the conscious viewer,’ the artists say about their work, ‘they should be like decals of somebody we already know or what to know’.

St. Ella First Floor

Billy & Hells

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Stella First Floor

Sarnai Second Floor

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Li First Floor

Hs端 Second Floor

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Anna First Floor

Precipice First Floor

Lotta Blokker

Amber Second Floor

Precipice was created when Blokker was only 23 and residing in Florence. The young woman in the statue lies in crouched position at a pedestal. ‘The sculpture expresses an emotion of holding on to the safety of that which is familiar,’ Blokker explains about the piece, ‘while at the same time it reveals a desire to grow and further develop oneself. The woman is realising that the choice for safety and familiarity is in fact not as comfortable as she thought. She will soon spread her wings…’

Myrrha Ground Floor

Lotta Blokker’s real-life sculptures are powerful and expressive as well utterly fragile and intimate. Blokker gets her inspiration from the great masters and masterpieces of art history: The Venus de Milo, Donatello’s Maria Magdalena and Auguste Rodin are amongst her leading examples. Yet her artistic practice also draws upon more contemporary artists such as Lucian Freud and Marlene Dumas.

After graduating from the photography department of the Lu Xuan Academy of Art in Liaoning province (China), Wang Ningde started working as a photojournalist. During the late nineties Ningde witnessed China’s explosive economic and cultural transformations. In 1999 he departed from documentary photography and started working on his series Some Days. Ningde’s blackand-white photographs express the tensions between China’s dynamic expansions and change in recent decades and the country’s persisting memory of the Cultural Revolution.

Some days #19 First Floor

Wang Ningde

Some Days consists of 75 numerically titled black-andwhite photographs the artist took between 1999 and 2009. In all of the melancholic and dream-like images the subjects have their eyes closed or are facing away from the camera. The photos are based on Ningde’s personal memories of growing up in China yet abstracted to such extent that the narratives touch upon a collective consciousness and shared history. The depicted people seem to be in a moment of introspection. Their closed eyes cut them apart from each other and from the viewer, as if they are lost in a dream or memory. Yet, Ningde states: ‘people are themselves when their eyes are closed’.

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Sacrifice First Floor

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Love is All First Floor

Margriet Smulders Margriet Smulders’s constructed photographs of floral still-lives are inspired by seventeenth-century still live paintings. The frivolous yet mysterious depths of the images represent the artist’s own life, sometimes deep and dark, at other times cheerful and bright. The flowers are for Smulders like actors enacting different dramas and revealing entire worlds. Tulips for Ensor, for example, expresses the need to move along with the flow of beauty. Yet this is not always easy, which explains the darker sides of the composition – just as life also knows darker moments. Investigation of these obstacles is what makes it interesting. Love is All, on the other hand shows softness and comfort. ‘I want to soothe the world, to offer consolation,’ Smulders states. In her still-lives

she frequently uses clouds of milk. Like a mother who soothes her children with milk Smulders aims to spread feminine tenderness in a powerful manner and, as such, to promote ‘strong tenderness’. Butterflies, depicting little white flowers, is inspired by Smulders’s memory of her first Holy Communion. ‘I still like to believe,’ Smulders writes, ‘like that little girl, that when one is honest and sincere and when you really try to do your best. To use your talents to fulfil your purpose on this earth, everything will be all right. Still my adagio is that when we do not act and be like little children, we shall not fully experience God’s realm on earth’.

Jeroen Buitenman In his artistic practice Jeroen Buitenman merges aesthetic beauty, spectacle and fine arts into surrealistic images. In the resulting phantasmagorias, the imagination can run wild. Buitenman’s fictive objects and images aim to express emotions and translate dreams and phantasms into existing pictures. ‘They are typical images I wake up to in the middle of the night,’ Buitenman states, ‘ideas I quickly have to write down in my notebook,

before I forget them again.’ It is not entirely clear what mood is being set in Buitenman’s works and the viewer is left to wonder what is really happening in his surreal, chimerical mirages. Emotions, for example, is based on Rembrandt’s famous work The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1631). Buitenman’s adaptation shows a stirring composition; something is happening, yet we don’t really know what.

Red Horizons Second Floor

Reach Out and Touch the Sky Staircase

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Emotions Second Floor

art &samhoud The Interview Second Floor

Gao Brothers The Gao Brothers, Zhen and Qiang, have gained widespread recognition with their socio-politically engaged art. The brothers have been deeply affected by their experience of the Cultural Revolution and by contemporary Chinaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s large-scale growth and expansion. In their wide body of work, the artists question socio-political issues and investigate the role of the individual within contemporary Chinese society. Yet their art also touches upon romantic spiritualism and universal human values and emotions. Through the medium of photography the Gao Brothers reveal a world that is simultaneously ruled by the imaginary and the real, creating a dimension that is both magical and ordinary. This is also characteristic for their Forever Unfinished Building series. The series shows people from different social classes, sex and beliefs. The bleak yet enchanted scenes reanimate fragments of daily life where the characters are experiencing solitude, melancholy, curiosity, happiness, indifference and other everyday, ordinary feelings. The work gives the viewer glimpses into Chinese contemporary life and, as a criticism of rampant Chinese progress, brings attention to the isolation of people who suffer from urban solitude.

The Forever Unfinished Building Second Floor

Untitled Second Floor

Maziar Moradi

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Maziar Moradiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s photographs at the Parkstraat are not individually titled but the series is called Ich werde Deutsch (I become German). With this project Moradi, himself an Iranian living in Germany, aimed to give a face to the people who have been forced to leave their country of origin and build a new life in Germany. In spite of the countless political debates about integration, the feelings, fears and hope of this young generation largely remain unseen. Having to adapt oneself to different cultures creates tensions. Integration is the driving force within this process, but this can be successful or go wrong. That is, it can result in actual integration but also in social exclusion. Moradiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s photo series is based on the different impressions, fears, experiences and losses of young immigrant in Germany. Many of the photos are staged, positioning the subjects as actors in their own lives.

Untitled Second Floor

Olivia Bee At age eleven Olivia Bolles, better known as Olivia Bee, accidentally got enrolled in a photography class and started shooting her friends and surroundings– capturing life as a teenager. She shared her photographs on the image hosting website Flickr, where she soon gathered a large following. When Bee was only fourteen, the footwear company Converse picked up on her work and asked the young photographer to shoot an advertisement campaign for the company. Major brands such as Adidas, Nike, Fiat, Hermès, and Levi Strauss followed, and her work has been published by The New York Times, Le Monde and Zeit Magazin, just to name a few. Bee’s more personal work, like the images featured in the series Kids in Love and Enveloped in a Dream, capture and crystallize the beauty of everyday life. ‘For the most part,’ Bee states in an interview for TIME, ‘my muse is everyday life. It’s kind of like enjoying where you’re at and appreciating what’s going on around you’. Both series span the photographer’s years as a teenager in Portland, Oregon. The dreamlike images reveal an earnest sincerity, like the photo from Kids in Love showing Bee kissing her first boyfriend under water. Kids in Love, Bee explains, ‘is about all of my friends in high school and what we did, the boys I kissed, the universe we created for ourselves.’ Although the photos are intimate and personal glimpses into the everyday life of the photographer, her friends, and their youthful experimentations, they capture memories and feelings that all of us might recognize. The images manifest that specific period in our lives when so many experiences and connections where new, intense and always seemed

like they would last forever, like the young lovers’ conviction that they will always stay together. Although Bee may be part of the Instagram generation, she prefers the timeless quality of film that allows for this shared recognition. ‘It lends itself to memory; it’s magical. I want to evoke nostalgia in everyone, and to take photos you can relate to, regardless of your situation, your gender, race, where you grew up, whether you’re a teenager…’

From the series Enveloped in a Dream First Floor

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From the series Kids in Love First Floor

art &samhoud Untitled First Floor

Untitled First Floor

Untitled First Floor Untitled First Floor

Untitled First Floor

From the series Panikmetropolen First Floor

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Udo Lindenberg Most people know Udo Lindenberg as a singer. In 1973 he had his breakthrough with the album Andrea Doria and since then became one of the most influential German rock singers of all time. However, from 1996 on Lindenberg started a second career as a painter. As one of his main influences he mentions Joseph Beuys, who just like Lindenberg reveals a strong socio-political awareness and commitment. From the mid-1980s onwards, Lindenberg got more and more involved in political issues; he is a fervent advocate of social democracy, supported the Africa aids Nackt im Wind and Live Aid, protested against the Berlin wall with his song Grüne Maur, and has been repeatedly involved in projects against Neo-Nazism. Concomitantly, many of Lindenberg’s paintings are dedicated to politically motivated themes such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the German reunification, and the East-West-relations during and after the Cold War.

From the series Die Zehn Gebote First Floor

Speaking about his art, Lindenberg firmly stresses the importance of being creative. Even if you haven’t studied art you should just go for it, he states. Just have the courage to be bold and imaginative without being self-conscious and defy all rules with a refreshing cheekiness.

&samhoud parkstraat 2 3581 ph utrecht the netherlands +31 (0) 30 234 86 04 info@samhoud.nl