LONDON.- Ronchini Gallery is presenting its second solo exhibition of Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde. This multidisciplinary exhibition features a new video installation, sculpture and neon wall works alongside his well known Nimbus photography series. The exhibition also coincides with the release of Smilde’s first monograph, Builded Remnants, published by Damiani.
Smilde explores the physical de-construction and re-construction of materials; light, space, atmosphere and experience in relation to his architectural environment. Creating a new moment between the realms of reality and the temporal, each element in the exhibition forms a physical construct, if only for a fragment of time.
The title of the exhibition, Dismantled Ruben, is an anagram of Smilde’s name and features as one of three neon works along with Traumbild Senden and Builded Remnants. These neon signs of glass, gas and light are at the same time conceptual and fleeting; changing narrative when put into a new order and creating a physical in presence of the artists own identity.
This fascination for changing how we experience both words, and his desire to edit them, relates to the act of building and Smilde’s process of creation. His on going dialogue with architecture and buildings is expressed in plastic moulds of Roman pillars. By stripping them to just the shell, he leaves them in a limbo-like trance wavering between the historical and infinite to the temporal and fragile. This reference to the way that we build and destroy as well as the fading of history from our memories is given back to us as a second of eternity.
His recent residency in Western Australia allowed him to create his first Nimbus clouds outdoors, whilst reacting to the ancient landscape of the Pilbara region by adding an ephemeral and artificial phenomenon to this vast nature at the same time. Defying nature and creating clouds in an atmosphere they already exist in, we experience the sensation from an image we think we experience everyday, into something hyper-real and outerworldly.
Berndnaut Smilde was born in 1978 in Groningen, The Netherlands. He currently lives and works in Amsterdam. Smilde holds an MA from the Frank Mohr Institute, Groningen. Selected exhibitions include: Saatchi Gallery, London (2017); RWA Bristol, (2017); Museum Kranenburgh, (2016); LIAN Contemporary Art Space, Shanghai (solo) (2015); FotoMuseum, Antwerp, (2015); Ronchini Gallery, London (solo) (2014); Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, (solo) (2013). Awards include a START stipend from The Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture, the FORM Artists’ Residency, Perth and Kings County Hospital, New York.
