Hanínga T.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My work can be classified as conceptual installation art.
It deals with social, political, and environmental themes. I refer to it as “projects”, rather than “artworks” – working like a field-investigator, doing a lot of research, and reflecting on my own involvement in this process.

My maxim is that art should be an open and provisional system of processing and portraying socially and politically relevant views. I don’t work as a propagandist – I’m more interested in how subjective ideas and experiences, prejudices, and preferences enter seemingly objective discourses. It is important to me to connect my art with society where it can function as a corrective for experiences in reality.

As an artist, I am working not only in for the arts appropriate spaces but everywhere: at public places, streets, back courts, stairways, and living rooms.
Comprehensive research is also part of my work.

Materials are found objects in combination with other media – neon, photography, video, sound, etc. I often use every-day articles in my work, investing the mundane and the ordinary with an element of transcendence.

Although I have got extensive training in painting techniques, and also worked as a pavement painter for several years, for a long time my artistic expression did not go in this direction. “Material” was always very important to me and this attitude found expression in installations and objects.
When in the literally first days of 2005 I all of a sudden felt the urge to paint, “material” in fragments was still with me.
My paintings are always part of a work-group, part of a theme or topic.
You can find correspondences and crossovers here, too, like in my installation work. Fragments of paper, metal, or fabric, etc., collage-like added to the paint are often a challenging counterpoint in the work.

The paint (mostly acrylic but also mixtures with oilstick and crayon) is applied in several layers, partly “unburied” again, obscured or over-painted anew.
The result is a multi-layered composition. The paintings are constructed from multiple sources, illusory worlds, imagination. Different realities collide and cooperate. The visual language shows up as a representation of the real and the ideal, formally coexisting within one picture.