6 ½ Weeks – Krystel Geerts

A large gate invites you to walk through, a replica of the gate lies in three parts on the floor. Shimmering white, fence-like elements hang on the wall, deformed bricks are piled up to fragile wall fragments. It is a world of transformation, transition and upheaval .

The works of Dutch artist Krystel Geerts (*1993, Deventer) are united by the intangible nature of their surfaces and materiality. They appear fragile and open, like blurred memories of baroque architecture. Not least because the process of their creation is inscribed in the works. For La Chimera, Geerts created a massive gate out of clay and used her bare hands and specially made tools to create a ‘flow’ in the material. Fingerprints can also be seen. She repeatedly threw clay discs at the wet clay colossus, which ultimately weighed 700 kilos, and they stuck to it. Magnificent, ornamental and yet dissolved and porous, La Chimera is a document of its creation and at the same time its negation. Geerts has moulded La Chimera I in polyester and La Chimera II in acrylic resin from the original. The solid clay door, on the other hand, no longer exists. Although the moulds retain the appearance of the gate, they are hollowed out and light as a backdrop.

Building of a Memory is Krystel Geerts’ first solo exhibition outside the Netherlands. Her works are inspired by architectural images that she finds on the Internet. The designs for her works ultimately emerge from memory, with the images from very different places overlapping and merging, creating the impression of a sensory illusion of incomprehensibility. In this way, Geerts comments on various illusionary techniques in the history of art and architecture, above all the Baroque period, and relates them to the present. After all, appearance and reality are increasingly diverging in the digital world: fake or manipulated images, videos and news are circulating on an almost equal footing with real information. What remains tangible in Geerts' work is the vague perception of a fragmented world.

Krystel Geerts (*1993, Deventer) studied at the AKI Academy of Art & Design in Enschede and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent. She currently has a residency at the Rijksakademie Amsterdam. Her works have been shown in group exhibitions at Saatchi Gallery London, 2024; Museum De Fundatie, Zwolle, 2023; C-mine Genk, 2024 and Galerie Tegenboschvanvreden, Amsterdam, 2024, among others.

Admission is free.

Funded by