PUBLISHING: AN AMSTERDAM THING
Elsa Tomkowiak—André de Jong—Mary Sue—André Stempfel—Pino Pinelli—Zhu Hong
30 May – 1 September
The TMH publishing program takes its inspiration from Amsterdam’s publishing and graphics legacy. One of our early exhibitions (2015) was dedicated to the legendary printed-art and documentation series Art & Project Bulletins, 1968-1989, and featured the entire set, numbers 1-156, for the first time in Amsterdam. Leo Vroegindeweij (currently on view in the front gallery of TMH) was one of the leading artists of the Art & Project gallery and created Bulletins 150 and 154. He joined the key players of conceptual art at the gallery, including Lawrence Weiner, Robert Barry, Alighiero Boetti, Daniel Buren, Stanley Brouwn, Joseph Kosuth, Hanne Darboven, Sol LeWitt, and Richard Long, among others. The history of Art & Project was the subject of an extensive recent exhibition at the Kröller-Müller Museum (2023/24).
On the occasion of our publication of Vroegindeweij’s new artist’s book, we now present a selection from the Bulletins. The artist’s book joins our special anniversary reissue of the TMH Jan Schoonhoven / Henk Peeters catalogue and opens our new catalogue series, Consequences I-V, forthcoming in full in 2024/25. In addition to the Art & Project Bulletins, the exhibition features limited editions and other works by TMH artists: ANDRÉ DE JONG, PINO PINELLI, ANDRÉ STEMPFEL, MARY SUE, ELSA TOMKOWIAK, ZHU HONG.
BIOGRAPHIES
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.
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 l’Instant at the Centre Photographique de Marseille.
Pino Pinelli (1938-2024, Catania) is renowned for his “pittura con corpo,” or painting with an “invitation to touch”: rhythmic wall cadences of palpable plaster marked by his signature imprint and color. His work is included in major museums and private collections in Italy and worldwide. His most recent museum exhibition was Pino Pinelli: Painting Beyond the Limit at Palazzo Reale—Gallerie d’Italia, Milan, in 2018, which followed shows at Museo delle Arti, Catanzaro, 2017, and the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, 2016. The Palazzo Reale catalogue, edited by Francesco Tedeschi, addresses Pinelli’s unique contribution to contemporary art.
Biographies continued below.
ELSA TOMKOWIAK
MARY SUE
LIMITED EDITIONS
TMH BAGS
BIOGRAPHIES (CONT’D)
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.
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.
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.