Not 4 U
30 June - 8 July 2007
'Not 4 U' was my graduation work at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. 'Not 4 U' expressed the theory of my thesis: Unlimited perception - my work in relation to Phenomenology as described by the philosopher Maurice Merleau Ponty.
In his book ' Phenomenology of Perception', Merleau Ponty described the artist as radical phenomenologist. Making art is the ambiguous result of being available to the complexity of the world. That is why I decided to exhibit all the materials that were removed from the academy building in order to establish clean white cube environments.
In a large scale installation I presented all the excluded piles of tables, cupboards and chairs that were part of a reality that the visitors of the graduation show were not supposed to see.
Not 4 U was a turning point in my artistic development. I stopped painting and drawing and started to work site specific. In my opinion, the role of visual art is to continually re-examine every cultivated, designed and directed space that we experience as real or reality.
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Best regards, Edwin Stolk.
images | kabk
