Eddy van Mourik
'MOUNTAIN'
September 30 - October 29, 2006
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Take a look at Het Plafond
Het Plafond has no regular opening hours, but opens up to the sidewalk at Gedempte Zalmhaven through a huge window. The installation MOUNTAIN and the construction process preceding it, will thus be visible day and night.
Eddy van Mourik
Eddy van Mourik was born in Rotterdam, and grew up along river Rotte: to him not just ‘a river’, nor even specifically ‘Rotterdam’s river’, but ‘River’ – the essence of all rivers. A tireless wanderer along its banks, he visualized the Rotte in numerous drawings, thus recreating it into his own River. Searching for its source in the polders outside the city he succeeds discovering one; unlike reality, Van Mourik’s river Rotte at Rotterdam flows directly into the Sea.
What he calls “the mountain next to Rotterdam” has been equally inspirational to him for years. As a boy he observed how an abandoned waste dump, located at the city’s outskirts in a bend of Rotte river was transformed into a real Mountain – as part of a recreational park.
Van Mourik observes and ‘mythifies’: the artist constructs a world of his own based on what he’s seen, heard, thought and wishes. This world is sometimes located in the here-and-now, but more often in a once-that-was. Be it by delicate diary scribbles, or by minutely built miniature landscapes carpeted with Rivers and Mountains, Roads and Castles, Van Mourik presents us with evocative tales – hís tales.
MOUNTAIN
“I want to build a mountain” – that is the essence of Van Mourik’s proposal for Het Plafond. Mountains in previous installations (‘The ranger’s house’, 2005 or ‘Castle along the Rotte’, 2006) have been rather small scale, and served as the backdrop – the ‘level’, to use a jargon word from the world of computer games that Van Mourik helped create in the past – for narrative, figurative layers: the ‘story’.
MOUNTAIN is Van Mourik’s first large scale work and it does without any added narrative elements: MOUNTAIN itself is at central stage. Mountain peaks, and the slopes leading up to them have been constructed out of cut up banana boxes, cladding a skeleton of delicate sticks of wood. Thus, MOUNTAIN is a composite of two visual structures: a sculpturally molded plane hovering thinly in space, and a 3D linear drawing in wood. In a material sense the work is rather ethereal – and yet MOUNTAIN starts an energetic dialogue with Het Plafond’s spatial reality: just barely fitting into it, seemingly bursting out of it at all corners. Quite something, an interior MOUNTAIN…
Mountains
The urge to build a mountain – isn’t that typically Dutch, typically ‘the Rotterdam way’? Mountains aren’t to be built, they just are – part of Nature, or maybe the result of Creation. A mountain – which mountain? Matterhorn, or Everest, or one’s local hill? Vesuvius, or Mount Fuji, or Popocatepetl? The Temple Mount, or Moses’ Sinaï, or ‘the fool’s hill’? Alpine peaks – the ones Goethe en route to Italy regarded as the majestically silent guardians of snows and storms and rain, or the backdrop of annual skiing fun? Mont Ventoux – Petrarca’s or Tony Simpson’s? Or maybe this ‘mountain next to Rotterdam’?
Van Mourik’s Mountain is probably all of them at once, not a portrait of a specific mountain.
We and MOUNTAIN
“For me it’s all about experiences. Being in the mountains, looking up to far away peaks and longing to climb there.” Van Mourik wants to share experiences – his experiences of daily reality.
This was the essence of the action ‘island’ he recently organized as part of the MOUNTAIN project. Peddling in his canoe, Van Mourik transported a selected group of people to a small island in the middle of a lake in a Rotterdam suburb – one by one: a silent voyage to a silent spot with great views of the city’s skyline, yet far away from it.
MOUNTAIN now. From Het Plafond’s sidewalk one can look up, at peaks receding into a blue atmospheric perspective. The usual view from the apartment behind MOUNTAIN out onto the street has now been blocked; instead Van Mourik offers wide vistas down from MOUNTAIN’s peaks.
For the time being, a mountain rises where used to be water – the filled in harbour basin where Het Plafond is located. Please, get the most out of it!
Artists’ books by Van Mourik
As mentioned above, Van Mourik produces small booklets with drawings that reflect his experiences of the world around him. Shortly he’ll start a ‘limited edition’ project of facsimile reproductions of such booklets, published at regular intervals and available on subscription basis. Van Mourik will present the first issue during MOUNTAIN’s finissage, on Saturday October 28th 2006 as of 8.30 PM. You are cordially invited to attend!
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© Guus Vreeburg / Het Plafond; Rotterdam, 060930
| Eddy van Mourik | |
| 1978 | born in Rotterdam |
| 1999 - 2002 | works as a 3D-animator and art director in the computer games industry |
| 2002 - 2006 |
BA-course in Fine Art at Willem de Kooning Academy (‘Art, media & |
| design’) in | |
| 2005 |
participant of the ‘Re_Cultivation’ project, SICE / Sarajevo International |
| Cultural Exchange; | |
| 2006 | Young Starters Award for Fine Art of the City of |
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participant of the ‘Reservaat Rotterdam’ artists’ project at the ‘De Tempel’ | |
| estate in the | |
| more info: | www.eddyvanmourik.nl |
| Programme | |
| September 15 - 29 | Eddy van Mourik building his installation 'MOUNTAIN' at Het Plafond |
| ongoing | |
| September 30, | opening of the installation; the artist will be present; short introduction |
| from 8.30 PM | by Guus Vreeburg |
| October 28, | finissage of the installation; presentation of first issue of Eddy van Mourik's |
| from 8.30 PM | 'limited edition' project; subscription opens |
| October 29 | dismantling of MOUNTAIN |
Contact & information
digital imagery is available on request
Willem Besselink + 31 6 19 4343 41
Guus Vreeburg + 31 6 4720 4750
Recent work by Eddy van Mourik may be viewed at his site