Steven Aalders, Acts & Places

Slewe Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition Acts & Places by Dutch artist Steven Aalders. It opens Saturday May 24 and will be on view until June 28, 2014. Time and place is a returning theme in Aalders’ works. In his new series of paintings stillness and movement are visible compositional elements. The square is a central motif. On view there will be two series of paintings. In one of the series, entitled Places, the image consists of an edged square. It is a static composition, in which either the central square or the edge is either colored or white. The image in the other series, entitled Acts, is divided in four squares and their edges. Here the composition is dynamic, in which the four colors are changing positions either as square or as edge in a rotating movement. The six-colored spectrum, which Aalders has explored in depth in his former exhibition, one will find here back. It has been recollected in simplified and larger planes. There are also references to the seasons, the four elements and the times of the day. The titles of the paintings are quotations from the poem Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot’s epic 20th century meditation on time and being. Aalders, known for his carefully hand painted geometric abstract oil paintings, evokes the history of modern abstraction, referring to the origins of Constructivism and Minimal Art. His work is an attempt to embody the essence, to create light and space through paint. Modernist serial principles such as repetition and sameness are both connected to older traditions in Western art and Eastern abstract art. The multi layered oil paintings demand a concentrated eye of the beholder. Steven Aalders, born in 1959 in Middelbug (NL), lives and works in Amsterdam. He studied in London at Croydon College of Art and at Ateliers 63 in Haarlem (NL). In 2002 he had a solo exhibition, entitled Vertical Thoughts at the S.M.A.K. in Ghent in Belgium, and in 2010 his exhibition Cardinal Points opened at the Gemeentemuseum The Hague, on which occasion a catalog was published with an overview of 15 years work, with texts by Benno Tempel, Rudi Fuchs, Thomas Lange and Steven Aalders himself. His work has been internationally collected by both private and public collections such as the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, AKZO Nobel Art Foundation, Caldic Collection and Museum Kurhaus Kleve (DE).