CRAYKE.- Kunsthuis Gallery opened its 2018 Summer show will featuring Dutch abstract painter René Korten and British sculptor Richard Mackness.

René Korten lives and works in the Netherlands, using the human race and the impact we have on the environment for inspiration. With Korten painting is a process alternating highly precise decisions alongside intuitive operations and only partial controllable actions. In one phase, the fluid paint finds its own way, in the subsequent phase he regains control and experiments extensively with the placement of a line or the undulations of a contour.

After Studying at the Moller Institute NLO Tehatex, Tilburg and the Academy for Art Education, Rene now teaches Art at Tilburg. Exhibiting in many galleries and museums across the Netherlands, Germany and into Australia, his works are also included in the collections of Museum van Bommel van Dam Venlo, IKOB Museum für Zeitgenössische Kunst Eupen, Museum Jan Cunen Oss, Museum Belvédère Heerenveen and in many public and private international collections.

Striving to create pronounced works that make connections, Rene believes that the world is an amalgam of chaos & horror and at the same time of beauty and ingenuity, as a result of human nature. Cultural and natural processes become virtually indistinguishable from each other, the formal and organic. His works contain images that are a parallel universe, rubbing against reality, growing, building, flowing and crashing in a syncretic way. The painting is its own domain as well as a portrayal of the (complexity of the) world in which it exists. There is no distinction between the abstract and the figurative.

Richard Mackness in contrast is a British sculptor who has exhibited for more than 40 years since taking a foundation course at York School of Art, before then graduating from Bristol’s polytechnic with a Fine Art Degree. Pursuing his own work whilst also tutoring others on a personal and commercial level, exhibiting nationally across the country and internationally in New York, Philadelphia and Germany.

As a child Richard was inspired and fascinated by the surroundings of his home town in York; clay from the banks of the River Ouse, statues, figures and grotesques that adorn many of the buildings fuelling the imagination with thoughts of Roman soldiers, animals and monsters. With his roots firmly concreted in the knowledge that creativity comes in many forms and that remaining true to instinct is key, Richard believes that sculpture is a particular discipline; it is a story told in form, mass and surface. It exists in space, sharing the world with every other thing, like a human being.

“I believe the imprint of touch and the human actions recorded in an object are important. Objects we encounter in the world are experienced through our physical being - we estimate, measure and reveal the world to ourselves as a reflection of the body we possess.”