ANTWERP.- FUNDAMENTS is a first solo exhibition by Linde Freya Tangelder (Destroyers/ Builders) at Valerie Traan Gallery, in which she reflects on the aspects that found her practice and presents an overview of the designs and processes that characterise her work.

In the inner and outer spaces of the gallery, Linde presents a collection of limited pieces selected and developed specifically for this occasion, in which she combines and fuses past and new works. The exhibition is therefore a well-considered looking back and forward at the dynamics that inform a practice, at choices that have been made and at an artistic identity that is becoming increasingly distinct.

Ever since the beginning of her design practice, Linde Freya Tangelder has embraced her affection for architecture, both topical and historical, and across the borders of cultures. It is there that she finds the structures and methods, forms and materials that she implements in sculptural furniture, interventions and objects that meet a human scale. All of these are elements that touch her, not infrequently move her, and can often be traced back to a certain essence of necessity, in which architecture accounts for elementary protection and for vital inventiveness.

Yet it would be a misjudgment to conclude that Linde Freya’s approach is fully explained by her link with architecture. Rather, it is a ground on which she continues to build, a base that she expands with sensibilities that she sometimes only fully comprehends in retrospect. Such as her approach to contrasts, her tendency to bring the industrial into contact with manual, even utterly labour-intensive procedures. Or how she elicits an interaction between open and closed volumes, between what flows and what is rigidly straight, between surfaces that generously return the light or absorb it unambiguously.

With FUNDAMENTS Linde Freya Tangelder formulates a certain intermediate position. An introspective presentation in which she introduces recent and new work and reinterprets realised projects and insights, further challenged by models and samples that usually hide on the shelves in her studio. It allows her to retrace her own paths of thought, to interpret the motives that inspire her actions. Equally, it is a conclusion, tentative but not premature, to an engagement between Linde Freya and Veerle Wenes that has developed over the years, and has now reached a point that implies perspectives even more than before.

It is reflected in an exhibition in the gallery which can be explored like a landscape and captures a diverse scope in a coherent image. With warm tones of Basel sandstone, only recently employed by Linde Freya, which continue in a brick backrest, resonate in the textiles and untreated oak wood, and finally settle in the reflection of the cool, hand-sanded aluminium and mouth-blown glass. The high and low volumes alternate, complementing each other and lead the visitor along vertical planes to the outside, where a lithostone path runs into a pond that gently splashes, its curved aluminium sides enclosed by lush foliage.

Jonas Lescrauwaet