PAN AMSTERDAM 2023

Sylvie Bonnot—André de Jong—Beppie Gielkens—André Stempfel—Mary Sue—Elsa Tomkowiak—Leo Vroegindeweij—Zhu Hong

19 – 26 Nov 2023

To celebrate our 10th anniversary year, TMH joins Walls & Cabinets at PAN—a fair for art, antiques, and design held annually at RAI Amsterdam. PARTICIPATING ARTISTS: SYLVIE BONNOT, BORIS CHOUVELLON, ANDRÉ DE JONG, BEPPIE GIELKENS, ANDRÉ STEMPFEL, MARY SUE, ELSA TOMKOWIAK, LEO VROEGINDEWEIJ, ZHU HONG. We continue to showcase artists of different generations and from different countries who push the boundaries of form in visual art. Presented by TMH in the context of innovation and history, this is adventurous and socially surprising artmaking at its best.

PAN PODIUM
Interview with Marsha Plotnitsky, Tue 21 Nov, 15:00-16:00

MEET THE ARTIST
With Leo Vroegindeweij, Thu 23 Nov, 20:00-21:00

Download Press Release

BIOGRAPHIES

Leo Vroegindeweij (1955, NL) is one of the most innovative contemporary artists and works at the intersection of a formal and conceptual vocabulary. He is featured in numerous museum collections and displays. In 2015 the Kröller-Müller Museum added his 1992 monumental work to its famed sculpture park. And his Apollolaan installation was seen as a pivotal contribution to the Amsterdam sculpture biennale ARTZUID 2017, curated by Rudi Fuchs. Winner of the 1985 Prix de Rome, Vroegindeweij was associated with the distinguished avant-garde gallery Art & Project, 1968-2001, and has since played a prominent role in curated and institutional surveys of Dutch art. Vroegindeweij lives and works in Amsterdam and in Méligny-le-Grand, FR.

Sylvie Bonnot (1982, FR) is a photographer and transmedia artist known for her radical questioning of documentary narratives. Her work is in museum collections and is the subject of two monographs: Contre-courants, Nouvelles Editions, Paris (2016), and Derrière la retenue, FACIM Foundation and Actes Sud (2017). Her major institutional exhibitions include: Musée des Archives Nationales, Paris, and Maison de la Photographie, Lille, 2019; Derrière la Retenue I, II, III (solo public commissions), FACIM Foundation, Savoie, 2019-23; and Musée de La Roche-sur-Yon, 2018. She was awarded the residency hors les murs 2021 at the Observatoire de l’Espace of CNES (the French National Space Agency) and was featured in their exhibitions at Interface in Dijon and PhotoDays in Paris, based on her trips to the Baikonur Cosmodrome and the Guiana Space Center. Most recently, Bonnot’s work could be seen in the exhibitions Échos des canters (LArbre machine) in Rémire-Montjoly, French Guiana, and Épreuves de la matière in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), in Paris. 

Beppie Gielkens (1942, NL) had the first solo show of her paintings in Maastricht in 1971 soon after graduating from the Jan van Eyck Academie. Unprecedented for a young Western woman in the 1980s, she received artistic acclaim in Egypt, with solo shows at the Fine Arts Gallery / Cairo Opera House in 1989 and the Mashrabia Gallery in 1994. She continued to have regular solo exhibitions with Dutch galleries and be included in museum shows with the Fries Museum, Leeuwarden, and Museum Belvédère, Heerenveen. Already in the late 1980s, art writer Huub Mous defined her work as an “intuitive urge to rearrange and order, in a new connection.” In 1979, Gielkens and her husband, the artist André de Jong, moved to Friesland, where they established independent studios.

Biographies continued below.

LEO VROEGINDEWEIJ

SYLVIE BONNOT

BEPPIE GIELKENS

ANDRÉ DE JONG

MARY SUE

Mary Sue
Universal Art Translator (U.A.T.), 2017
Video projection, no sound, continuous duration
Ed. of 15
Maid in Progress, 2017
HD color video, stereo sound, continuous duration
Commissioned work
Ed. of 7

BIOGRAPHIES (CONT’D)

Zhu Hong (1975, FR born CN) moved to France to counterbalance her training in Shanghai. Her solo museum shows included Musée de La Roche-sur-Yon (accompanied by the monograph 3m2 de lumière, published by Lienart Editions, Paris, 2017) and the Pôle Internationale de la Préhistoire in Les Eyzies-de-Tayac, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dijon, and the Musée Ziem in Martigues. Zhu Hong was featured in Making Things Happen at TMH in 2017-18. Her work continues to receive increased attention, notably including a solo feature at the Art on Paper fair in Brussels, 2019, with SinArts Gallery, NL, and the two-part solo show Les lignes de l’eau [Water Lines] at the Musée d’Arts de Nantes in 2022. In 2023, exhibitions that included her work were Un bref instant éblouissement at La Maison de l’Erdre in Nantes and Perceptions at Le Repaire Urbain in Angers. Zhu Hong lives and works in Nantes, FR.

Boris Chouvellon (1980, FR) began to exhibit as soon as he finished his art studies, including at the prestigious Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Arts at the Villa Arson, Nice (MA). In 2015, he became laureate of the Friends of the Maison Rouge prize, Paris, and has had important museum residencies. He recently had a solo show at La Crypte d’Orsay in Orsay, France, and has been awarded an Etant Donnés residency in Los Angeles, USA, by the FACE Foundation. Chouvellon takes his cue from entropy and decay, from remnants of labor and leisure. In his uncanny objects and situations, sculpture blends with photography and video. Chouvellon lives and works in Paris.

André de Jong (1945, NL) has been pushing the limits of drawing in his magisterial oeuvre for over five decades. And he is also a performance artist, a photographer, and a master of sculptural form and transient land art. Rooted in poetically captured trajectories of the body, of our ambivalent, gender-stretching sense of self, de Jong’s art is uniquely intersubjective and socially formative. De Jong’s prescient oeuvre remained virtually unseen for four decades—he has been living and working away from art centers in the countryside of Friesland—until Museum Belvédère, NL, mounted a retrospective in 2010. Since then de Jong’s work has met with critical and public acclaim when exhibited by TMH in Amsterdam and New York. In 2021, the monograph André de Jong: Acts of Drawing was published by TMH with the support of the Mondrian Fund. The monograph is a “book about” and a haptic art object, arranged into thematic chapters that bear the titles of his series, and provides a unique introduction to his vast photographic output.

Elsa Tomkowiak (1981, FR) is acclaimed for her paintings and large-scale installations grounded in color and spatial experience—the artist’s and viewer’s. She is widely known for her ongoing commissions in public and cultural venues, indoors and outdoors. Her notable temporary projects include: an opera house (Nantes), two bridges (Quebec), a glasshouse (Pougues-les-Eaux), site-specific interventions at the Château-Musée de Tournon-sur-Rhône, the Basilique Saint-Vincent de Metz, and Saint-Briac-sur-Mer at the invitation of FRAC Bretagne. Tomkowiak’s permanent installations include a multi-painting installation extending throughout a hospital facility in Angers, 2017, the commission for a park sculpture in Lyon, 2019, and a monumental mural along a cycle path in Ille-et-Vilaine, 2023. Following her participation in Making Things Happen at TMH in 2017-18, Tomkowiak was selected for ARTZUID in Amsterdam and for the OpenART Biennale 2019 in Sweden. In 2023, her work was featured in the project Territoires Extra, led by the Gateway Centre for Contemporary Art in Brest, the group show Quelque chose comme in the botanical garden of Rouen, and the Festival d’Art de l’Estran for land art.

André Stempfel (1930, FR) is known as an iconoclastic reinterpreter of geometric abstraction. After he lost his works in a fire in 1970, his practice centered on the visual language of the monochrome, primarily in yellow. Stempfel has been part of the international art scene from the late 1960s and became an honorary member of the international MADI movement in 1989. His works are part of important collections such as that of the Mondrian House in Amersfoort (NL), Pompidou Center and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (FR), the Mathematics Museum (Arithmeum) in Bonn (DE), Satoru Sato Museum (JP), Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires, Museum Ritter (DE), and Museum of Geometric and MADI Art, Dallas (USA). In Paris, he is represented by Galerie Lahumière, and his works were shown at important art fairs such as Art Basel, Art Cologne, FIAC, and Art Paris. In 2023, TMH highlighted his work in the extensive solo show, An Amsterdam Retrospective. Stempfel lives and works in Paris, where he shares his studio with his wife, the poet Evelyne Wilhelm, who collaborates with him on his artist’s books.

Mary Sue (assumed identity, established between 1979 and now) uses color to a poignant effect in performances rendered as videos, photographs, art objects, and drawings. Under her sobriquet adopted while at the ENSA of Dijon, she has had exhibitions in France, Belgium, and Italy and has participated in Art Basel, FIAC, and Art Brussels. Mary Sue’s working method, deploying the most advanced digital means, involves a critical reading of real places and situations through the prism of her cartoonish alter ego. Her vast project on childhood and loss, La Flotte, gained attention at the Art, ville et paysage festival (2017) in Amiens. Mary Sue was part of Making Things Happen at TMH, Amsterdam, 2017-18, and was TMH’s artist in focus at Independent Brussels, 2019. She participated in the XXIV International Encounters Traverse Video Festival, Toulouse, in 2021 and the curated presentation 11 Women of Spirit VI at Salon Zürcher, New York, in 2022. In 2023, Mary Sue’s works were featured in the solo exhibition ENTARTAINMENT at TMH, her large-scale installation La Flotte II was on view at the Sanatorium de Bergesserin, and her work was included in La Nuit de lInstant at the Centre Photographique de Marseille.