27 October 2018

The last year and a half have brought many good changes to our law practices at Heron Legal. We have expanded our team, gained new clients and further renovated our Eindhoven office. For these reasons and to fulfil our wish of sharing our great passion for art we are happy to announce our first in-office art exhibition.

Art does not only make our workplace more attractive, it also creates a stimulating and inspiring work environment, which is reflected in our unique way of working. We believe art enhances our creative thinking, leading to innovative solutions for our clients in our daily business.

We love to show our affinity for modern and contemporary art and we promote art with great enthusiasm, connecting our business network with our cultural networks.

From 1 November through 31 December 2018, Heron Legal presents two exhibitions: downstairs 10 new paintings by Evi Vingerling and upstairs 9 newly acquired works on paper by American artists of the early 20th century: Arthur Wesley Dow, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Milton Avery, Joseph Stella and John Marin.

Evi Vingerling, A Walk in the Park

In this group of Evi Vingerling’s work her thoughts were concentrated on the paradise through which we pass daily, using the parks around her house as a metaphor for the times in our lives when things are all right. The ever-returning paradise within reach and the potential of what is already ours.

Time and again, those moments in day-to-day reality are her point of departure. The result is always part of a longing for the greater whole, the spontaneous 'all'. In order to give intensity to that desire, there is a need to be well-prepared: the unique moment is retrieved in a photograph and sought anew in series of drawings. The ultimate act of painting is on edge, with a brush that needs to be just full enough for the paint not to drip. This leaves little time, but the flow of the painterly process does allow for experimentation. The technique remains transparent, comprehensible, and thereby creates no distance. On the basis of that openness, the images become imbued with new meaning. Vingerling endeavors to set the 'incomprehensible' in motion and render the spark for observation. Just as in the Chinese and Japanese traditions, where artists aimed, after practicing endlessly, to set down on paper the very essence of a landscape. To hit home. Just as the lines in drawings by Warhol, or by Matisse, seem by chance to end up in the right place. Vingerling turns that combination of practice and chance into a method so that we can see what she saw and thereby also become part of the spontaneous, the 'all' of Evi Vingerling.

Vingerling is represented by tegenboschvanvreden in Amsterdam and Kristof De Clercq Gallery in Ghent, BE.

In the short future more of Vingerling’s work will be on view at Galeria Maior, Palma de Mallorca, Spain (opening November 22, 2018); tegenboschvanvreden, Amsterdam (opening February 1, 2019); Kristof De Clercq Gallery, Ghent, Belgium (May 2019) and in June 2019 she will start work on a commission by the Dutch Government of large scale frescos at the Royal Academy of Sciences, Trippenhuis3, Amsterdam.

American Modernists

Heron’s recent acquisitionsfocus on artists of the early twentieth century who share a place in the renowned Stieglitz Club which was the first Contemporary Art Gallery of its kind in the United States and shared a common mindset in a time influenced by the teachings of Arthur Wesley Dow.  At the time the idea emerged in America that the mindless repetition of art was no longer a suitable art education, but that Art should focus on the most personal of aesthetics and experiences. The idea, quite subtle in its beginnings, changed the art world completely.

The early 20th century American Modernist movement laid the ground for the Abstract Expressionist and Pop Art movement and would lead to an about-face of the art world. Instead of diligently following their traditional European methodology of copying old masters, artists began implementing the American example of self-awareness and personal aesthetic leading to movements as Cobra and the German post-war Expressionists. Think for example of Ad Reinhardt who in his 1975 book Art as Art wrote, “The most personal is the most universal.”

Dow (the metaphorical father of the early American Modernists group) explained the importance of art education as that it functions as “a very direct exercise of the critical powers, developing judgment and skill, to increase the [student’s] efficiency whatever his calling may be.” He recognized “appreciation as a divine gift, the natural endowment of every human soul, and that where it did not lead to art making it always lead to desire for finer form and more harmony of tone and color in surroundings and things for daily use.” (Dow, Theory and Practice of Teaching Art, 1914). He thought it of great importance that every young person should develop this skill and designed his art education, to be taught from kindergarten to University, to this end.

The group of artists at this movement’s beginning met and discussed often. They lived in a time of great changes in the booming beginning of the industrial revolution. In a time when Cubism, Bauhaus and Futurism with all its extremes was gaining steam in Europe these Americans focused on a softer path.

 

View by appointment only until 31 December 2018.

 

 

 

Heron Legal B.V.

Fazantlaan 23

5613 CB Eindhoven

The Netherlands

 

T +31(0)85 303 18 00
E maurice.van.valen@heronlegal.com
E evi.vingerling@gmail.com
www.heronlegal.com