16 JUNE 2023 – 30 SEPTEMBER 2023
Corona also brought beauty. Steef gifted me a weekend in Edam, where I was born, it eventually turned out to fall in the middle of the first lockdown. We had an incredibly beautiful and nice weekend. We slept in a bed and breakfast in the most beautiful house in Edam. A few years earlier on one of our walks I had pointed it out, she herself had discovered that there was a sign saying B&B behind the window. Martijn Roos lives there. He is or was a childhood friend of my sister’s and she arranged for us to sleep there. Martijn is the son of Aart Roos, a well-known artist from Edam. Now we are at the topic I wanted to get to.
I have described the visit to Edam in corona time in a long-winded blog, so I don’t need to write much more about that. It was a crazy weekend in which everything depended on coincidences. I then spent the evening in my room reading the book published on the artist’s work and life and loved it. When the hotel opened, we had a large number of Aart Roos’ drawings framed and hung on the hotel corridor. An exhibition hardly anyone has seen! It is kind of topical because history repeats itself. Some of the drawings are from 1956 when the Russians brutally crushed the uprising in Hungary against the Stalinist regime.
I always had the idea in the back of my mind that we should organise an exhibition of paintings by Aart Roos. The works were collected last week. They are now sitting against the walls of the gallery where they will hang. The work has the space and even without being hung, it shows how beautiful it is. For me, it is a very special story that began with a weekend “back to Edam” and has been given hands and feet through this exhibition we are making together with Martijn. Roos’ old work is perhaps best suited to today’s sense of aesthetics, but we chose to show more or less an overview anyway. As so often with deceased artists, despite success in life, they still fall into oblivion; only the greats seem to escape this fate. But now that this work hangs together, you can conclude that in this case, and perhaps in other cases too, that is a mortal sin. Aart Roos’ life’s work is more than worthwhile.
To realise the topicality, I have asked Menno Doornbos (a good friend, his role in this story is described in the corona blog) to see if he can find a young artist who will respond to Roos’ work. Halfway through, it becomes a kind of duo exhibition where a living artist responds to the work of a deceased artist. A dead and alive exhibition!
This post is also available in: NL
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