Han Schuil

Sculpture (one of two) hanging below the apartment building "La Fenêtre" at the Prins Willem Alexanderweg in The Hague, made by Han Schuil in 2005.

Han Schuil (born 12 February 1958, Voorschoten)[1] is a Dutch multimedia artist, who works in a Dutch tradition of compactness and tension in painting.[2]

Biography

From 1979 to 1981 Schuil attended the Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Rotterdam, the predecessor of the Willem de Kooning Academy. He went on from there to Ateliers '63, a postgraduate program in Haarlem, where he worked from 1981 to 1983. He made his debut in 1983 at the gallery Art & Project.

In his early career, Schuil worked on canvas. After experimenting with wood, aluminium, and copper, he has opted for aluminium since 1985, because it provides a smooth surface for painting. The shapes formed by aluminium often play a central role in Schuil’s work. Examples include the folded edges and the seams and rivets in the aluminium, which sometimes run straight through the picture plane.

Over time, Schuil has also shown a growing tendency to have the support protrude into three-dimensional space. Schuil frequently treats the aluminium before painting it, making dents and holes that become integral parts of the picture. “I use them not to emphasize the thingness of the picture, but because they fit into the picture,” Schuil told Dominic van den Boogerd in 2000.[2]

In the mid-1990s, Schuil’s work became more complex. By mirroring, doubling, and combining motifs, he fashioned increasingly elaborate and baroque compositions. In addition to creating these intricate works, he has also continued to draw on the plainer pictorial language of his early years.

Work

The origins of Schuil’s artistic themes lie in everyday reality and range from comic strips, video games, and computer graphics to road markings, a skating suit, an infrared photograph, and an MRI scan. Writer and curator Lynne Cooke described how these motives relate to Schuils work.

“The particular object which struck Schuil forcibly enough to provide the genesis for this images is, as so often in his work, not readily or precisely identifiable, though its very mundanity invests the resulting work with what might be deemed the visual counterpart to that feeling of having something on the tip of one’s tongue - something at the corner of one’s eye? -, the reverberation of something well-known that nevertheless eludes identification, that resists naming. Displaced metaphors, elusive visual memories, connotations conjured the countered or otherwise undermined, the depicted and the actual held in ambivalent equivocation: these are some of the principal means by which Han Schuil affirms the inclusive and contemporary nature of abstract art, while at the same time respecting the logic of pictorial coherence and objecthood as prescribed by a formalist aesthetic” [3]

According to Bert Jansen "the meaning they have in the real life is lost as soon as the feature as signs in a Han Schuil Painting."[2] Rudi Fuchs, former director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam placed Schuil in a Dutch tradition of compactness and tension in painting. [2]

Exhibitions

Solo (selection)

Group Exhibition

Collections

Work by the artist is held in various public and private collections

Bibliography

References

  1. ↑ Han Schuil at the RKD
  2. 1 2 3 4 Han Schuil, Schilderijen - Paintings 1983-1999, text: Rudi Fuchs, Dominic van den Boogerd, Bert Jansen, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, NAI Publishers, Rotterdam, 2000
  3. ↑ Han Schuil, Material Metaphors, Lynne Cooke, Fodor Magazine, 1987
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