Holland Isn’t Japan

Mickael Marman (b. Oslo, 1983) is an artist based now in Oslo. His abstract paintings are recognizable for their contrasting and fauv-ish colors, playfully expressive compositions, and textured surfaces enmeshed with “non-traditional” materials like sand, newspaper, and rocks. For this show, Marman wanted simply to make work that felt like landscape, which is to say, work that could hold a few agendas and none at all (à la Per Kirkeby). This desire to paint for the sake of painting came after a recent trip to the Gambia, his father’s home country. When confronted this time with the urge to paint about his travels, as he has done in the past, he couldn’t see the utility. Where in previous works the application of found newspapers gathered from local cafés onto his canvases could suggest some passage of time and specificity of place, the sheets of newsprint paper laid across his large multi-panel painting _Vårbillede_(2026) are blank instead. There is a certain ease to the way his compositions pile and flow that is deceptively simple at first glance. On closer study, one finds that the surfaces of his work are left intentionally thin, made through instinctive choices of blending, bleeding, revealing and concealing with dot patterns or wide swaths of color. While formal abstraction lends a kind of stubbornness towards or attempt to remove subject matter or even subjectivity, Marman places himself within that tradition by pointing at the past all the while painting anew. Daan van Golden (b. Rotterdam, 1936–2017) was a leading figure in the field of contemporary art; the epitome of an artists’ artist. Van Golden spent the years of 1963 to 1964 living and working in Tokyo; prior to this time, the artist had exhibited within the Netherlands a well regarded body of abstract, expressionistic paintings executed in a restrained palette of black and white. As van Golden noted in a letter sent from Tokyo to Schiedam, dated February 1964, “Holland isn’t Japan” and this change of environs led to his development of a practice extraordinary for its distinct quality of patience and self-reference. During his time in Tokyo, van Golden created, in a deliberate and meditative manner, a series of highly formal paintings based upon the designs of Japanese cloth and department store and product wrapping paper. This marked the beginning of his lifelong engagement with a radically creative practice of art- as-finding. The present exhibition brings together two very rarely exhibited works Untitled, (1960/69) and Untitled (2011); in fact, one work has only been exhibited once prior in Tokyo, the second, twice in both the Netherlands and Tokyo respectively. Each work embodies the transformation that van Golden’s work underwent after visiting Japan, as well as the highly contemporary aesthetic that he continued to refine throughout his lifelong practice, from the 1960’s to the early 2000’s.