Geel als citroen, rood als tomaat - Ineke Hans & Erik Mattijssen
2020/21, Museum Valkhof Nijmegen (NL)
Museum Valkhof asked Ineke Hans & Erik Mattijssen to exhibit their work together. Without knowing eachother before, this combination prooved to be very fruitful and rewarding for both.
Sharing an interest in storytelling, objects with particular functions and old habits, the combination of their work became a source of recognition mixed with a trip on memory lane responding to our current habits and behaviour.
The exhibition had a high feel-good factor, which - because it started in the middle of the corona time - had a cathartic effect and received a lot of praise from the press and visitors.
The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue with personal texts by Ineke Hans and Erik Mattijssen
Since the exhibition was received very well Kunsthal Rotterdam invited to make a follow up in 2021
commision: Museum Valkhof Nijmegen
exhibition design: Studio Ineke Hans
publications:
- Catalogue desiged by Esther de Vries and preface by Hans Piena, curator National Dutch Openair Museum, see
- NRC a new meaning for the word museum shop, NRC - sept. 2020
- Interview on emotion in design, Volkskrant - okt. 2020
photo's:
FF: Flip Franssen / TH: Tom Haartsen / SE: Sanne van Engen / EM: Erik Mattijssen / IH: Ineke Hans
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Museum Valkhof on Yellow as a Lemon, Red as a Tomato:
In 2019 we focused on the link between young and old; in 2020 we address the interweaving of art and design.In this colourful exhibition, the museum challenges the Gelderland-born furniture and product designer Ineke Hans (1966) and the artist Erik Mattijssen (1957) to come up with something special: to put together an exhibition in which they visibly react to one another’s work. The surprising and tantalizing result created by these two well-matched celebrities runs from 21 June to 13 September in Museum Het Valkhof in Nijmegen.
Design Without Frills & Proustian Still Lifes
With her roots in Gelderland and abroad (ArtEZ Arnhem and the Royal College of Art London), Ineke Hans (1966), who spends part of her time living and working in Berlin, specializes in product and furniture design. She draws inspiration for her products from new and traditional materials and techniques as well as from common sense, folklore and human behaviour. Functionality and common sense are of paramount importance to her. A product must be accessible, but at the same time unusual. Ineke Hans is a manifestly Dutch designer who designs sustainably from a socially aware perspective and absorbs and questions the social changes and developments in our society. She sees this as a process of creative thinking and trial and error until it works. The result is an oeuvre of no-frills products and prize-winning designs.
Erik Mattijssen (1957), like Hans, is interested in objects and interiors. He combines his penchant for specific colours with his love of typography and product advertising from the pre-war years. In an almost Proustian way, Mattijssen depicts personal recollections that reference our collective memory. There is a certain melancholy to his work, sometimes a touch of nostalgia. It transports you to places that seem vaguely familiar, a bedroom or living room, a kitchen, a shop full of foodstuffs we don’t see on the shelves any more. His meticulous attention to detail leads the viewer to make new discoveries all the time; a cat sleeping under a bedspread, a reel of cotton, a pencil sharpener.
The Interweaving of Art and Design
In Yellow as a Lemon: Red as a Tomato,Ineke Hans and Erik Mattijssen explored each other’s work and respond to it. They complement one another, reinforce, interrogate and comment. Sometimes led by intuition, sometimes by shape or content. More often it is the kinship in their great love for the object, for each other’s collections that have nothing, yet everything, in common. Collections of unusual objects with remarkable functions, or of objects with recollections of bygone eras. Hans and Mattijssen make an exhibition full of wonderful combinations, which occasionally grate, but more often seem to go together. Again and again, colour, shape and meaning are happy linking elements. A visit to Yellow as a Lemon: Red as a Tomato is a fascinating adventure.