metropolis m

For the Intercity exhibition at De Fabriek in Eindhoven, in which she exhibited with other Frank Mohr Institute alumni in May, Marielle Buitendijk (b. 1976) showed work that was exceptionally large – 550 cm x 340 cm. It was a challenge, because she normally works in the more usual ‘landscape’ format of 120 cm x 180 cm. Buitendijk completed her studies last year at the Frank Mohr Institute graduate school of the Minerva Academy in Groningen, after studying at the St. Joost Academy in Breda. At the Frank Mohr Institute, which is affiliated with Groningen University, so that students can follow courses there as well, Buitendijk immersed herself in philosophy. She read about the spectacle, about imaginary worlds, about how crowds work themselves into a frenzy and about truths that are not true. During the last year Buitendijk has made a name for herself within the Dutch art world with black-and-white paintings of empty, bleak football stadiums with a strange shroud around them, as though you were looking at a negative of an out-of-focus photograph. They are inspired by spaces that refer to the ‘spectacle’, but leaving out the spectacle itself produces images laden with atmosphere, whose cold mood reminds us of football stadium disasters in the not-so-distant past. In Buitendijk’s work, the stadium is a horrifying, man-eating monster, not exactly the place where the family shares a day out. She plays with our collective memory and shows what cannot be seen. She does it with such virtuosity that last year she was the recipient of the Dutch national painting award, the Koninklijke Prijs voor de Vrije Schilderkunst, and an exhibition at GEM in the Hague. Earlier this year her work was shown at the Kunstvlaai art fair and Aschenbach & Hofland Galleries in Amsterdam. In a short space of time Buitendijk developed her own characteristic painting style, making use of a range of spray techniques. Her subjects are taken from photographs she finds on the internet or in magazines. At the Frank Mohr Institute she had already shown an interest in photography, not so much by realistically painting from photographs, but because of their lack of sharpness or fish-eye effects. Photography pretends to be a reflection of reality, but it also brings with it its own (technical) distortions, which often, at least in the first instance, go unnoticed. Buitendijk discovered that applying paint with spray techniques produces a good facsimile of that lack of sharpness and distortion, and from that moment on, spray techniques have been her trademark. Initially, she used spray cans, with which she quickly developed her own signature handwriting. Today she prefers the rather more subtle airbrush, but in a coarse form, with a lot of splattering. She finds the ‘skin’ of a painting very important, and the spatters make that skin more tangible and tactile. www.mariellebuitendijk.eu