Whitehot Magazine

Alex van Warmerdam's First U.S. Exhibition of Paintings at Grimm

Alex van Warmerdam, White shed / Woman, 2024, oil on canvas, 170 7/8 x 53 1/8 inches

 

By EDWARD WAISNIS January 12, 2025

This exhibition of the work of Dutch polymath* Alex van Warmerdam, his first in the United States, with the focus on his paintings–while there are also two discreet video installations in a lower gallery–that concern themselves with haunting re-workings of figures and scenes culled from an archive sourced from books, publications and personals photos and mounted under the befitting banner title of: Apparitions. The spectral title accurately presages a sort of rogues gallery inhabited by assertive personages (spirits) carefully positioned (posed) with foreboding stillness and a mood drenched in caution, treading a line between care, finesse and derangement.

Perfunctory perusal brings comparisons to, most obviously, Luc Tuymans. Delve a little deeper for an amalgam of Magritte and Balthus and to be brought within a whisker of a certain aspect of Richter. While the psychological underpinnings reach the archness of Neo Rauch in their dryness and in their histrionics that steer clear of the historic.

Surrealism is the preeminent atmosphere. Something van Warmerdam has a way of tuning in to as evidenced in his films which carry evocations of Buñuel, while allowing the devotion and psychology of Bergman into this intermittent decade that feels on the way to a destination.

In his experiments, and deep fascination with, the mundane, the lowly and, yes, the abject, van Warmerdam, unlike another creative with such proclivities Bukowski, for instance, who chose to live his everyday existence as if he were one of his characters, or Jarmusch who, while practicing what he preaches in his day-to-day, benefits from distancing in mastering the deadpan, van Warmerdam invests in irony.

Alex van Warmerdam, Untitled, 2022, oil on moving blanket, 47 1/2 x 39 5/8 inches

Amongst a gallery full of high points is Untitled, 2022, painted on a moving blanket offers an anomaly beside the canvases and a successful integration of an unusual substrate, up there with the forays of Kiefer and Schnabel. Upon this ground is a replication of a streetscape distinctly of another time (19th century storybook) and place (Northern European storyland), two cobble-lined roads meeting in a wonky vanishing point flanked by two adolescent boys at attention, heads cocked–a signature fancy–one of them strongly resembling Franz Kafka.

White shed/Woman, 2024, obviously sourced from pedestrian photos, transformed by an imploring mysteriousness. In it we are confronted by a self-assured woman whose hair style and pleated skirt place her in the 1950s as she stands on the left flank of the picture and stares straight back at us. The landscape behind (or, is it a mural or studio backdrop given that she seems to be standing firmly before it) here shows a receding road–van Warmerdam likes these receding line compositions–that dourly concludes at a hulking building that could be anything from an Amazon warehouse to a grow house or a crypto energy farm.

van Warmerdam continues his compositional interests in some interesting choices, such as the forced (photographic) perspective seen in Two Sisters, 2024, that focuses on the clunk shoes of the girls and leaves their upper bodies and heads in a diminishing fuzz, as though the photographer has a fetish. But what it does for the viewer is to put one in direct confrontation with artifice that has been exhumed by the painter.

Alex van Warmerdam, Man in Sunlight, 2024, oil on canvas, 19 3/4 x 19 3/4 inches

Throughout van Warmerdam’s steadfast and alternately stabbing and feathery brushwork stands out as well as his strength of restraint in tonalities; previously on full-tilt in Morandi, as well as Tuymans, this pale and powdery effect is mastered. Somehow, I feel, that van Warmerdam’s earlier work as a scene painter comes to service.

Alex van Warmerdam, Doll, 2024, oil on canvas, 23 7/8 x 19 7/8 inches
 

Peppered through the show are what van Warmerdam as referred to as "tronies", a term the Dutch apply to particularly Golden Age generic portraiture that served interchangeable decorative purposes. The repetoir was featured, as a solo exhibition a few years back at the gallery’s Amsterdam locale. Here the selection includes Man in Sunlight and Doll and Man With Grey Eyes, all 2024, with the first in the octave of a barely there wispiness, the downcast gaze of the second emits fifties noir crossed with its eponymous figure and the grey eyes are not what catches ones attention so much as the pink hair contrasting with the W. C. Fields nose sporting cobalt rosacea of the unfriendly man.


Alex van Warmerdam, Man with Grey Eyes, 2024, oil on canvas, 23 5/8 x 19 3/4 inches
 

In the nether space the two simply, but elegantly displayed film works resided. Gaper (Yawner), from 1984, is constructed from a two-and-a-half minute silent black and white loop projected onto a pillow comfortably propped into a corner. The face transmitted repeatedly commits the act of the title, while the visages appearance, enhanced by heavy grease paint, leaves one with the feeling of having come across a Buster Keaton outtake (missing reel?). This piece should carry a warning–in the same way that Tony Conrad’s The Flicker carried a warning against the possibility that it could induce epileptic seizures–that prolonged viewing may induce the reaction depicted by the actor. The tour de force of Schepselen van het woud (Creatures of the forest & With Reiger (White Heron), 2018p, eight minutes fifteen minutes in duration plays repeatedly on a vertical screen next to a canvas of the same size. The deceit in the animation is found in that it is a record of the process/progress of the actual canvas mounted adjacent, as it undergoes a wide array of depictions, steadfastly punctuated by layers of black paint. The painting itself represents the final state, coming to rest on a heron exuding serenity.

Alex van Warmerdam, Two Sisters, 2024, oil on canvas, 47 1/4 x 44 7/8 inches

As an introduction to van Warmerdam's paintings this exhibition hits all the right notes while giving a high-level of satisfaction.

Alex van Warmerdam: Apparitions
Grimm
54 White Street, New York
December 13, 2024–February 1, 2025

* van Warmerdam is considered among the top ten film directors in the Netherlands, his most widely known film is Borgman, a nominee for the Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Incidentally, but curiously, he made a film titled Grimm. He has also acted, in his own and other films.
 

Edward Waisnis

Edward Waisnis is an artist and filmmaker. Additionally, he is the Producer of two Quay Brothers films, Through the Weeping Glass and Unmistaken Hands, as well as having overseen the facilitation of their 2012 MoMA retrospective. His writing has appeared in Art New England, COVER, ARTextreme and STROLL.

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