From 29 May to 2 October, the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam will present recent work by Kees Goudzwaard. Goudzwaard’s paintings display lucid forms, neatly arranged and, in a number of cases, apparently connected by pieces of tape. For all of his paintings Kees Goudzwaard makes models of wafer-thin materials such as paper, transparent foil and tape. He works for weeks, occasionally months, on the ‘prototypes’ for his paintings. During the actual painting, he carefully applies thin, even layers of paint in order to achieve a reproduction of the paper model that is as accurate as possible. In fact, he (re)constructs the paper model in paint on the canvas. The exhibition From 29 May to 2 October, the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam will present recent work by Kees Goudzwaard. Goudzwaard’s paintings display lucid forms, neatly arranged and, in a number of cases, apparently connected by pieces of tape. For all of his paintings Kees Goudzwaard makes models of wafer-thin materials such as paper, transparent foil and tape. He works for weeks, occasionally months, on the ‘prototypes’ for his paintings. During the actual painting, he carefully applies thin, even layers of paint in order to achieve a reproduction of the paper model that is as accurate as possible. In fact, he (re)constructs the paper model in paint on the canvas. The exhibition entitled Kees Goudzwaard. Tuning shows recent work in which various ordering principles and formal starting points are attuned to one another: everything dovetails perfectly.
Kees Goudzwaard (1958, Utrecht) lives and works in Antwerp and Reusel. In his work, an exceptional encounter takes place between various painterly approaches. With his geometrical form language, Goudzwaard appears to adhere to the modernist tradition of the twentieth century, a tradition in which the painting is no longer regarded as a painted representation of reality but primarily as an object with a representation that is an existing reality in itself. But his paintings are extremely realistically painted representations of models that he creates with paper, plastic sheets and tape. Modernism and realism meet in Goudzwaard’s paintings. The model and its painted reproduction are both only a few millimetres thick, which emphasizes the flatness of the painting as object. But because there is a suggestion of space, due to transparent overlapping, for example, or the effect of the colours, the notion that the painting is a flat surface that refers to nothing but itself must come under pressure. This tension is constantly visible in the paintings, regardless of how self-evidently and logical the forms (and intermediate spaces) may be attuned to one another. Rhythmic patterns arise due to the fact that Goudzwaard places geometrical forms in a certain sequence, covers the backgrounds or perhaps exposes them. As a consequence, the suggestion of movement and space arises, consistently in a different way. In this context, the foreground and background, as visual elements, are equally important. In his paintings, Goudzwaard makes use of a limited number of colours.

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The book Kees Goudzwaard – Provisional Space will be presented at the opening of the exhibition: 96 pages, 21 x 28 cm, issued by ROMA Publications, Amsterdam. The book is on sale in the Museum shop for € 24.