Blog
Unforgettable Exhibitions #1
Land by Krijn de Konig, copyright Paul Seawright
02/02/2021
Some exhibitions stay lodged in your memory. 'Land', a site-specific installation by Netherlands artist Krijn de Konig, is one such.
He re-sited some of Edinburgh College of Art's College's collection of 265 casts of antique, Renaissance and Gothic sculptures, though I think only classical ones were used. These great beasts were in a stepped landscape of ply thatr occupied all of the splendid classical atrium at the heart of the College. The casts are in different scales, different states of decay. Some he half-submerged in a sea of wood, some were at strange angles, there were odd juxtapositions, all visually unified by their pallour in the creamy terraces of ply.
It was a perfect show; ambiguous, ineffable, a rare physical and psychcological experience that felt like being in a porridge-coloured painting by de Chirico. Powerfully shaped objects of the utmost craggy beauty, many dismembered, broken, truncated, but all the more moving for this -these were juxtaposed with two kinds of linear formality, classical and contemporary. And the setting - splendour and order, mathematically disposed pillars and arches in richly articulated space, the third element being the terraces of wood.
Suddenly you could get close to the nose of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, while the Venus de Milo pressed her nose against a wall and Zeus cradles an infant up to his armpits in ply, like a father teaching his son to swim.
He re-sited some of Edinburgh College of Art's College's collection of 265 casts of antique, Renaissance and Gothic sculptures, though I think only classical ones were used. These great beasts were in a stepped landscape of ply thatr occupied all of the splendid classical atrium at the heart of the College. The casts are in different scales, different states of decay. Some he half-submerged in a sea of wood, some were at strange angles, there were odd juxtapositions, all visually unified by their pallour in the creamy terraces of ply.
It was a perfect show; ambiguous, ineffable, a rare physical and psychcological experience that felt like being in a porridge-coloured painting by de Chirico. Powerfully shaped objects of the utmost craggy beauty, many dismembered, broken, truncated, but all the more moving for this -these were juxtaposed with two kinds of linear formality, classical and contemporary. And the setting - splendour and order, mathematically disposed pillars and arches in richly articulated space, the third element being the terraces of wood.
Suddenly you could get close to the nose of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, while the Venus de Milo pressed her nose against a wall and Zeus cradles an infant up to his armpits in ply, like a father teaching his son to swim.
