UNSEEN AMSTERDAM 2022
Mary Sue—Sylvie Bonnot—André de Jong—Leo Vroegindeweij
15 – 18 Sep 2022
TMH is pleased to join Unseen Amsterdam 2022—a photo fair held annually at Westergas, Amsterdam. Our fair presentation includes Mary Sue’s new photo-performance series ENTARTAINMENT, and a preview of our TMH exhibition New Photography and the Ephemeral. Artist in focus: MARY SUE. Participating artists: SYLVIE BONNOT, ANDRÉ DE JONG, LEO VROEGINDEWEIJ.
BIOGRAPHIES
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.
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.
Biographies continued below.
MARY SUE
ENTARTAINMENT #1-6, 2022
Performance process, C-print
105 x 105 / 55 x 55 cm, each
Includes artist’s frame
Ed. of 7
HD video, stereo sound
14’03” (looped)
Video only
Ed. of 7
HD video, stereo sound
14’19” (looped)
Video only
Ed. of 7
SYLVIE BONNOT
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.
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 (L’Arbre machine) in Rémire-Montjoly, French Guiana, and Épreuves de la matière in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), in Paris.