HAARLEM.- The Knight’s Tour is an international group exhibition presenting the work of six prominent rising artists: Jennifer Tee (NL), David Jablonowski (DE), Roger Hiorns (UK), Christina Mackie (UK), Nina Canell (SE) and Navid Nuur (NL). De Hallen Haarlem’s monumental ground-floor space – the renaissance Vleeshal – has been reserved for this sculptural presentation.

In a world that seems largely dematerialised by a wide range of digital developments, these artists work to arrive at new sculptural approaches to ‘the object’. Each of them asks the question: ‘what is an object, and how can we know it?’ The creation process plays a key role in their work, and specifically in the exploration of this question. The choice of materials holds a special significance for these artists. For example, organic materials such as animal brains and wood, and minerals like semiprecious stones and copper, are used for their ‘magical’ aura. The works are not just a concrete form, but acquire a meaning that transcends their appearance. These artists manage to breathe new life into the Modernist notion of the aura of the artwork.

Most of the works in this signalling exhibition will enter into a direct relationship with the architecture of the exhibition space. The Vleeshal, which already has a pronounced sculptural presence of its own, thanks to its columns, ornaments and vaulted ceiling, forms a backdrop for works that in many cases were made especially for this exhibition.

The Knight’s Tour makes a knight’s move from Lunar distance, the parallel group exhibition that can be viewed in De Hallen Haarlem’s other spaces. While the artists in The Knight’s Tour explore ways to express the intangible and indefinable, Lunar distance, in contrast, brings together more rationalistic artistic visions.

Together, these two exhibitions inventory a number of positions in contemporary art that take as their point of departure the proposition that only human creations can be fundamentally understood.