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Pieter Holstein at De Zonnehof - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article
Art in America, Jan, 1999 by Janet Koplos
Pieter Holstein's more than 100-work retrospective of paintings and works on paper at De Zonnehof--a serene late Gerrit Rietveld gallery building--impressed with its piquancy and proliferation. Holstein, 64, attended Cooper Union in 1954-57 and showed at P.S. 1 and Artists Space in New York in the late '70s, but his work remains quintessentially Dutch. He is most celebrated in Holland for droll colored etchings he produced in the '60s and '70s which make exaggeratedly simple observations about the world. These deadpan comic works often play with ideas of perceiving, labeling and representing that are inherent to art. Both in tone and in subject, Holstein is related to the concurrent works of Ger van Elk, Bas Jan Ader, Sigurdur Gudmundsson and others in Holland, with some kinship to other Europeans such as Ben Vautier as well, although unlike all these artists, he does not feature himself in his work.
Holstein's earliest drawings and prints consist of delicately Kleelike figuration whose deformity is also reminiscent of some CoBrA art of the '50s. His work of the last two decades has included prints of an entirely different character, notably black-and-white, densely patterned landscapes that tip over into phantasmagoria. The bold lines recall tribal carvings, taotie designs on ancient Chinese bronzes, and linear textiles such as molas--all networks in which one can find grimacing faces. Painting, to which he has returned at intervals, is not his best medium: he muddies his surfaces and turns sentimental.
The colored etchings adopt the manner of children's coloring books or primers, except that they have tongue-in-cheek captions or visual punch lines. The actions are often slapstick-literal, having to do with looking or not looking, being inside or outside. But they are given sly touches. In the left side of an etching divided down the middle by a dotted line, a businessman with a briefcase stands on a cliff looking at the stars; in the right side he stands, feet planted firmly together, his back to all that beauty, space and scope for the imagination. In another print, a yellow wood box sits inside a wooden room--or is it inside another, bigger box? The presentation may be jokey, but it raises questions of perspective and relationships. The Dutch curator Gijs van Tuyl once wrote that Holstein's works don't reflect reality but meditate on the reflection of reality. That's a stance that the artist amplified in this retrospective by declining to title or date most works, so that they ran together in a perceptually disorienting chatter, like a film jumping its reel.
COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group
