budget and collecting

Collecting is choosing. Every budget is limited, so is mine. May is the month I usually spend the most money on art. This has two main reasons. The second is ArtAmsterdam, that is the biggest art fair in the Netherlands. It's mainly Dutch but it has a sturdy international component. Quality is high, some art is within my budget. The last two times I bought art and I never intended too when I went.

The first reason is the art and design sale in the Tac in Eindhoven. That's the place I started to buy art in such quantities I started collecting. Since the first time year it's kept I go and buy. This year won't be different.
Janneke Sprenkels will be there and probably Marleen v/d Heuvel or Matthijs v/d Kerkhof. Merel van Beukering and Liselotte de Groot (both on my watch list) might be there as well.
Tac is short for Temporary Art Centre. It's situated in an old Philips building. (For the Football fans: the Philips stadium, home base for PSV,is right across the street. Philips was founded in Eindhoven.) Tac is meant for creating art. There are dozens of ateliers in the building and a small dozen of multi purpose spaces. Exhibitions parties, workshops and the Art and design sale are held here. Many artists from my buy or watch list will be there so I will leave Eindhoven with a trunk full of art and ann empty wallet.

That's the easy part. There are however artists who are high on my watch list, but I'm sure I won't meet on ArtAmsterdam or in the Tac. So I'm helping faith a little bit. I e-mailed Liselotte Schuppers for a price query on the photography and I will go tomorrow to an exhibition from Liesje Reijskens in Amsterdam. Next to this I received lists from gallery Aeroplastics for Amanda Besl and Shadi Ghadirian.

The problem gets obvious far too many artists and works and not enough budget. To make things worse I've already decided to buy one large work from Carla van de Puttelaar. My biggest buy ever considering size (205 x 78 cm) and price (twice the amount from my second largest buy.) Although I will pay this in 36 months it still creates a gap in my budget.

I alomst forgot the works from Boukje Janssen which came back from New York but are stuck now at customs.

So this month it's decision time.

The least likely to buy this year is the work from Amanda Besl.
She makes paintings on small panels depicting adolescent girls.
To compensate here her picture "a beautiful moustache"



Artist's Statement of Amanda Besl:

In my recent work I try to evoke an open-ended fiction while speaking of the documentary quality of photography, the language of fashion photography, the viscosity of oil paint, and the transient nature of memory. My paintings emerge from a cultural feminine perspective, exploring the complexities of an aesthetic that fetishizes youth. The images are a string of metaphors that build series of events. The paintings are small in size in order to allow a more intimate viewing experience and to recall their history as photographic images. They pop from the wall off beveled edges to create a staccato rhythm of frozen suggestive moments. My pieces are cinematic in nature. I link seemingly unrelated sensory images which inform each other as narrative moments. The subject matter balances on the fine line between the mundane and the obscure. To view these paintings is to partake in a visual eavesdropping on the secretive world that engulfs today's girl.

I focus upon metaphors of the transient nature of adolescence. Horses act as a suggestive counterpart in paintings which are mostly devoid of human males. The fetishistic quality of these pocket-sized worlds emphasizes the idea of obsessive crushes. I am interested in heroic transformations of ordinary events which exist both as dark psychological secrets and as adult fairy tales supplanting their predecessors. These paintings are not nostalgic, except as personal nostalgia. They are not apologetic or hedonistic and have any number of possible endings or possibly no ending—just a pause, a breath.