Albada Jelgersma Gallery is proud to present the first solo exhibition with new work by Rob Johannesma, titled glass-blue days. This is the first exhibition to show paintings, alongside works on paper and photo prints from his archive.
Rob Johannesma collects images from books, newspapers, magazines, and has built up an extensive archive in his studio. Gradually, over the last two decades photo and video recordings of landscapes has shifted to images from art history and everyday life; the street, the city, pictures of world news in newspapers. He places these images in a new context, pulls them apart, copies and layers them, zooms in on a forgotten detail, and then paints over parts of the image. This way the original image is put under pressure.
The starting point for Johannesma's paintings was the work The dream of Constantine by Piero della Francesca. In his paintings he uses jagged shapes and structures, to build up images. Brush strokes explore the size of the canvas, patches of color are overlapping and add depth to the image, giving the viewer the sense of a whole hidden world behind the image itself. Johannesma’s paintings cast a new light on his fascination for color, perception and image in the context of art history.