Fried eggs, french fries, sandwiches and ketchup bottles, Barbie dolls, marbles and autumn leaves. Artist Tjalf Sparnaay captures images of such trivial themes and expands them to enormous format, like claps of thunder on one’s retina. Around fifty of his oil paintings, created between 1989 and 2004, will be on show in Museum de Fundatie in Zwolle between 17 January and 6 April 2015. Closer is Sparnaay’s first museum presentation in the Netherlands.
Photographer and painter
Tjalf Sparnaay (Haarlem, 1954) was a sports teacher when he fell under the spell of photography in the early 1980s. With his camera, he went out to record everyday life all around him in series of snapshots. At the same time, he taught himself to paint in his spare time, inspired by the magic realism of Carel Willink. In the eighties and nineties, the themes of his photos, such as a flattened coca cola can, a bicycle on a bridge or tulips in a vase, became the basis of his painting. It was also at that time that Sparnaay discovered ‘photorealism’, a movement within American art in which the artist copies/paints reality in a true-to-life manner on the basis of a (sometimes) blown-up photo, where the cool, hard photographic reproduction becomes the pictorial aim. Renowned photorealists such as Ralph Goings, Charles Bell and Richard Estes were his role models. Sparnaay gradually distinguished himself with his extreme enlargement of reality and the abandonment of the pure photographic image. He himself refers to this phenomenon as ‘mega-realism’.
Mega-realist
Sparnaay not only documents reality but also intensifies this by blowing up everyday objects to mega-proportions. This gives him the opportunity to explore every detail very closely and to dissect it layer by layer in order to arrive at the core of the theme. ‘My paintings,’ remarks Sparnaay, ‘are intended to enable the viewer to experience reality once again, to rediscover the essence of the object that has become so common. I wish to reduce it to the DNA of the universal structure in all its beauty. I call it ‘the beauty of the everyday’. The way in which Sparnaay approaches his work refers directly to the seventeenth century. He resembles Vermeer in his lucid use of colour and eye for detail and refinement, while the lighting in his paintings recalls the play of light and shadow in the work of Rembrandt. Sparnaay elaborates on the rich seventeenth-century Dutch tradition of the still life, but does so on an individual and modern manner. He is constantly seeking new images that have never been painted. And he finds them in his own environment: ‘By using trivial and everyday objects, I enable reality to flow from my brush once more. My intention is to give these objects a soul and a renewed presence.’ Closer in Museum de Fundatie demonstrates how a painting can be common and monumental at the same time. From the collection of Museum de Fundatie, Sparnaay selected a number of classical and modern still lifes that are now displayed parallel to his own work, this enhancing the field of tension within his impressive oeuvre even more. The exhibition will present his latest work, entitled FoodScape, which is, with dimensions of 120 x 300 cm, the largest work that Sparnaay has ever made. This will be the first time that the work will be shown in public.
The book Closer. Het Megarealisme van Tjalf Sparnaay, with texts by Ronald Plasterk and Jan Six, will be published by Uitgeverij Waanders & de Kunst to accompany the exhibition. During the exhibition period, the documentary film Getting Closer by Hester Hagemeijer will be shown in Museum de Fundatie. (Thank you Christy & Peter Draaisma for the book!)
(Tekst Website Museum de Fundatie)
“Stunning realistic! Find out about what Mondriaan has to do with Sparnaay’s The dishwasher & Carel Willink with Hester’s hands at the exhibition in Zwolle…..” (Ineke Eibergen)
More information: http://www.tjalfsparnaay.nl/en/