MARIJN AKKERMANS (Kunst)

*****
1975, NIJMEGEN, THE NETHERLANDS, LIVES AND WORKS IN AMSTERDAM.

(...) In the artist’s recent works these scenes are replaced by a more portrait-like presentation of the figures, to the extent that they look out directly at the viewer in classical portrait poses. Like vague memories, echoes of early 19th-century portraiture shimmer through the surfaces, recalling a time when the emerging bourgeoisie began to define itself by way of the inwardness and intimacy of family relationships. Did this promise of warmth and security not at the same time secretly entail a loss of personal autonomy and psychological integrity, making room for a kind of dependency on others that was heretofore unknown in the firmly defined roles of earlier eras? When in Marijn Akkermans’ drawings monstrous metallic-looking women’s hands encircle a child, or hair cascades down to form a cage that constrains movement, the borders between emotional bonds and ties that bind, between protection and possessiveness begin to blur. How else to escape such dependency than by hatching impenetrable strategies culled from unfathomable depths, appearing at best as blind spot? As we scrutinize the drawings, the way the figures are built up out of layer upon layer of glaze seems to invert on itself, generating the impression that the artist has skinned his figures in his urgent searching for what is hidden beneath the surface. Only in the end – cognizant of how he has injured his own creations – does he stop at the border marked by the edge of the white paper and listen to the echo of his mental images, without being able, however, to get a grasp on them.(...)

By Gudrun Bott, taken from ‘There’s no Place like Home’ in Marijn Akkermans; Back Then, The World Was Bigger, published by Galerie Gabriel Rolt, Amsterdam, 2008.

www.marijnakkermans.nl