HAARLEM.- From 21 January 2017, De Hallen Haarlem presents three solo exhibitions, by Kasper Bosmans, Richard Tuttle and Evelyn Taocheng Wang. Poetry, beauty and elegance seem to play an important role in their work – that is simultaneously drenched in history and permanent oscillations between ‘then’ and ‘now’, tradition and the present. Moreover, all three artists have a special interest in the expressive possibilities of specific materials, which endows their work with a great tactile sensitivity.

Tuttle focuses on the unforeseen expressiveness of small gestures and simple materials, in a formal idiom that could be termed poetic-minimalist. In the work of Wang and Bosmans, both a penchant for the decadent as well as the more crafty expression of folk art is discernible. They intuitively combine information from diverse historical, literary and scientific sources and cultural traditions into idiosyncratic narratives.

With the exhibitions of Bosmans and Wang, our departing curator Xander Karskens concludes his curatorship at the museum. In the past decade he has given the contemporary art programming of the museum a razor-sharp profile and international élan.

Solo exhibition Richard Tuttle
Location: De Hallen Haarlem and the Frans Hals Museum
The minimal, sensitive and sometimes sensual gesture: that is the trademark of American artist Richard Tuttle (Rahway, New Jersey, 1941). With a small number of ‘poor’ materials – from paper and cardboard to thread and textile – he creates sculptures and paintings that speak a thousand wordless languages. Those who know no better would call Tuttle a formalist. His oeuvre, however, is permeated with the fact that art can be ‘nourishment’ for one’s inner life. For the historical Vleeshal on the Grote Markt, Tuttle is developing a new, monumental ceiling sculpture that indirectly seems to respond to the history of seventeenthcentury Haarlem, the Dutch city where damask and silk of the highest quality were produced.

Solo exhibition Evelyn Taocheng Wang – Allegory of Transience
Location: De Hallen Haarlem and the Frans Hals Museum
The first solo museum exhibition of Chinese artist Evelyn Taocheng Wang (Chengdu, 1981) is based upon her fascination for Dutch painting from the Golden Age. During her childhood in China, this Dutch art functioned as a pars pro toto for the entire history of Western art. Wang connects personal memories and fantasies to larger themes, such as cultural and sexual identity and exoticism, and develops these in performances, paintings and videos. In this exhibition the artist reflects on the history of Haarlem as a place for innovation in seventeenth-century painting. She does this on the basis of the representation of the human body and clichés concerning the ‘male view’. A new video piece will situate this theme in several locations in and around Haarlem that are historically associated with gender categories – such as the courtyards for single women, the so-called Hofjes of which Haarlem still has twenty functioning.

Wang extends her domain into the Frans Hals Museum, where she casts an exoticizing glance at the Wadden Islands with the video series A Home Made Travel MV Series, as part of the ongoing series ‘New & Old’. On view from 25 March to 20 August 2017.

Solo exhibition Kasper Bosmans
Location: De Hallen Haarlem
The young Belgian artist Kasper Bosmans (Lommel, 1990) creates mysteriously elegant objects and paintings in which he intuitively combines his interest in local folklore and sociohistorical anecdotes with the symbolic potential of materials. Like an artistic anthropologist, Bosmans combines stories and legends from different cultural and historical contexts in an associative manner. He blends these into speculative new mythologies for our demystified world. In this exhibition Bosmans responds to hidden histories in the collection of the Frans Hals Museum | De Hallen Haarlem.