DUESSELDORF, GERMANY.-Stiftung museum kunst palast presents Neighborhoods: the Netherlands and Flanders - SLOW ART – Dutch and Flemish Contemporary Art, on view through November 6, 2005. The "SLOW ART" exhibit will expand the "A CELEBRATION OF PAINTING" picture show by adding a look at the current art scene in the two neighboring countries of the Netherlands and Flanders. Presenting 37 artists, both renowned as well as young and unknown, the exhibit will illustrate the reception and further development of the traditional artistic genres of still life, landscape and portrait in the past twenty years.

"Life is fast, art is slow", wrote the Swiss painter, author and Romantic Johann Heinrich Füssli back in the eighteenth century. Many of the artists shown here are creating, in this day of hectic lifestyles and excessive visual stimuli, works of art which will only unfold their effects to visitors who bring plenty of time along with them. Not infrequently, the work required to create this art also took a good deal of time.

The Belgian Robert Devriendt, for instance, uses oil on canvas for landscapes that show great attention to rendering the material. He often spent months on his extremely small-size works. He forces the beholder to take a very close look and perceive nature down to the smallest detail. The Dutch artist Elske Neus - inspired by the Vanitas still lifes of the seventeenth century, which depict beetles, flies or snails - lets snails crawl over a circle of six small monitors in her video work "Dans". In her work "Bett", the Dutch artist Maria Roosen takes up the skillful representation of reflections and refractions of light characteristic of the still lifes of the Old Masters: two glass balls glowing pink and orange lie between rumpled bed sheets in the form of female breasts whose round surfaces reflect the surroundings.

On exhibit will be paintings, graphic and plastic works, as well as video works by Dutch and Flemish artists such as Berlinde De Bruyckere, Marlene Dumas, Rineke Dijkstra, Mark Manders, Aernout Mik, Thierry De Cordier and Luc Tuymans. In conjunction with the exhibit, there will be a performance evening entitled "SLOW LIFE PERFORMANCES", featuring such artists as Yael Davids, Lawrence Malstaf, Wim Vandekeybus, Carsten Höller, Marina Abramovic and Jan Fabre, among others, on October 31, 2005.