ALBADA JELGERSMA Gallery is pleased to announce Marenne Welten’s exhibition Double Take. This is Marenne Welten’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The opening is Saturday, March 19 from 5-7 pm. The exhibition runs through April 23.
In her work Marenne Welten seeks to depart from the familiar, away from the known. The more time you spend looking at her paintings, the more they reveal. From single brushstrokes, figures and interiors appear, charged with emotion and a certain historical baggage. Since Marenne Welten started painting on canvas twenty years ago, her work can be divided in two parts. On the one hand she works on projects, immersing herself in a certain place or history and creating a series from that. In between these projects, Welten goes ‘back to the kitchen table’, literally and figuratively.
In Double Take we see a selection of paintings from these ‘in between’ periods, all made from memories of her childhood home. In these works, she aims to see the place she grew up in through new eyes, letting go of all emotions and baggage associated with it. In her mind she walks through the rooms as if for the first time, focusing purely on forms, colors and dimensions. From that she gets to work, allowing herself to experiment with new ways of painting. To unlearn what she has learned.
The result in the exhibition is a collection of carefully selected paintings from the past twenty years, where we see the constants in her work, but also how her practice has evolved over time. How going back in time has been instrumental in allowing Welten and her work to move forward. The paintings from her childhood home can be seen in the front space of the gallery. The backroom shows a selection of works on paper that were initially made for her exhibition House of Men, currently on view at Stedelijk Museum, Breda, dealing with the Old Men’s House in which the museum is located.
Marenne Welten (1959) lives and works in Middelburg, Netherlands. In 1983 she graduated from the St Joost Acadamy in Breda, Netherlands. Currently Marenne Welten’s solo exhibition House of Men is on view in Stedelijk Museum, Breda, through July 3. Solo exhibitions over the past include at De Pont, Tilburg, Netherlands; Museum Kurhaus, Kleve, Germany; De Vleeshal, Middelburg, Netherlands; Kunsthalle Lingen, Germany; Spacebureau, Antwerp, Belgium. In 2016 she was part of the group exhibition On Empathy at Bridget Donahue in New York. Welten will have a solo show with Harkawik in New York in April this year.
