January 27th - March 9th, 2010

Opening times: Tue - Fri 10 am - 6 pm + sat 11 am - 3 pm

At first glance it might seem as if the work of Holger Niehaus centers around a moment of confusion. Indeed, the beauty of his work is always what the themes of his photographs are. For this reason it is still not long enough: often at first glance we encounter seemingly classical elements from the Dutch and Flemish baroque—flowers or fruit still lives—Vanitas, as the case may be. Something is certainly off in each of his nonetheless amazing works. Fruit is perfectly arranged, meticulously peeled and therefore becomes a composite of a fruit still life and a nude. A blood orange rots and develops a wonderful color composition. A faded flower becomes a beautiful, life-size dancer. A sunflower is thickly painted with oil paint and offers, among other things, a very new look at still life, photography and, of course, van Gogh.

Through technical perfection a closed universe comes into being, whose effect is strengthened by the thought that here a fundamentally temporary sculpture is captured by means of photography in an object made of frame and glass. With scissors, scalpel, varnish, glue, tape, stencils, paint and a precise eye, we encounter gorgeous arrangements out of light, color, surfaces and intensity.

In some works the painterly element is particularly emphasized by allusions to icons of modernity. Masterfully—but also subtly and discreetly—the border between painting and photography is broken. For example, if Holger Niehaus varnishes the stem of a luminous red amaryllis and shows the flower in front of a background of the very same red in a blue vase on a yellow base, we are reminded of Barnett Newmanʼs groundbreaking series Whoʼs Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue. Or if the artist scrupulously clips a colorful bouquet of flowers so perfectly linear and square that the outline belonging to the black, right-angled vase is combined with it, one could see an homage to Malevitchʼs Black Square from 1915. This style of controlling nature is well known in the history of landscape architecture and is here effectively paraphrased and subtly challenged.

The precise materials of the elements in the images are sensually inspired. The frequent sterility and purity of their placement could hardly be further away from their natural environment. This is not just in itself a broad provocation, rather this style of manipulation challenges both the natural and the constructed in the compositions in question. The Vanitas element acts even more intensely and abstrusely the more cleanly and perfectly the composition is constructed. In historical genres, the Vanitas concept turns out all too often to be a grimace. Not so with Niehaus, with whom it achieves a contemporary encoding and consciously avoids tradition. Holger Niehaus respectfully positions himself in a two-sided comparison, on levels of iconology and the history of photography.

For a relatively short time, Holger Niehaus has additionally worked on abstract surface compositions of colored paper. As an experimental and refreshing practice, this work sustains an essential point in itself with respect to both photography and painting. In the end both artistic genres are nothing more or less than color, surface, light, shadow and composition. The artist controls the cohesion and play of these elements almost to perfection in both the figurative as well as the abstract works.

Holger Niehaus was born in 1975 in Nordhorn, Germany and studied at the AKI - Academie voor beeldende Kunst en Vormgeving in Enschede, The Netherlands. After multiple solo and group exhibits in Amsterdam, Utrecht, Santiago de Compostela, Hamburg and Berlin amongst others, he completed the year with his first museum show in the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, The Netherlands. We are therefore particularly pleased to present work from the Hague as well as new work in the LOADED exhibition.