Albada Jelgersma Gallery is pleased to invite you to the opening of Play Yesterday, a solo exhibition with recent work by Marenne Welten. This is her first solo exhibition with the gallery. The opening is Friday November 23 from 5-9 pm. The exhibition runs through January 26
Marenne Welten works on projectbase and in series. The works in the exhibition Play Yesterday came together after her visit to New York in 2016. For these works she researched the history of the United States since the first settlers set foot. She is fascinated by the history of America. This fascination was aroused especially by the stories of the settlers, by the rawness of their existence and by the way in which they took in the new continent. She uses stories such as those of John Steinbeck (East of Eden) and Annie Proulx (Barkskins), and deals with themes from her own past.
In her paintings she seeks to express the chaos that history can create in our mind. She interweaves events from history with people and objects in the present. By wiping away her paint, she evokes sensations of movements and the passing of time: memories and history fade with the paint. She then layers the paint again, with the underlayers often remaining visible. The portraits that she painted in 2018 are literary characters in stories about the emigration of Europeans to North America in the 1700s.
For her collages she cuts the objects, interiors and characters. The past is placed in a new setting, which she overdraws again. She then cuts them over and over again, until she has combined history in such a way that she wants to glue it. The images create distance, as the past does. At the same time we experience the heaviness that the past can have, with complications and elusive connections.
The images of Marenne Welten evoke our historical consciousness: how do we see our past? And how do we weave the personal memory into our historical reflection? Marenne Welten makes the past personal with her work.
For this exhibition Marenne Welten published the book "Play Yesterday" with a text by Anne-Marie Poels (chief editor of H ART).
