Gert Verhoeven
KASK Lecture

KASK Lecture organized on the occasion of Gert Verhoeven's solo exhibition at KIOSK, Spellbound (17.04.2021 - 06.06.2021).

With his works, Gert Verhoeven seeks a place within a broader social and artistic context. In this context, he refers to both the broad history of art and the world beyond. From popular culture to the classical canon, with Verhoeven it becomes a dynamic whole that influences, challenges and taunts each other. Via - sometimes obscure - backstreets, he connects these worlds until they feel like a logical whole. This journey is concept-driven, independent of a specific medium and can be reflected in sculptures, drawings or videos. In KIOSK, he will be showing his latest work, Spellbound, a series of animations based on doodles, small scribbles, notes of his supposedly fantastic ideas for sculptures to be realised later, which Verhoeven made in his sketchbooks all the time, during the day, but also at night, when he was awake. Drawings of 'genius ideas' that later turn out to be nothing but little sketches, reminiscent of drawings made without much thought during a telephone conversation, purely out of boredom. With Spellbound (which literally means bewitched), Verhoeven refers to Hitchcock, who told Truffaut that he kept a notepad next to his bed at night to jot down his ideas for new films. Hitchcock wakes up and looks at what he wrote that night; 'boy meets girl'... 

The drunken creatures that Verhoeven shows in his animations refer to the ambiguity of the idea and his creation. What inspires the artist and how should the creative process be shaped? The artist can have such good intentions and think out his strategy as well as he likes, but ultimately, it is not the most difficult, most intellectual or most time-consuming ideas that make a good work of art. In any case, that is not where the direct inspiration lies; it may be in a scribble of which you have forgotten afterwards what you were drawing. It is the tip of the iceberg, or creation in its purest form, without too much 'fuss'. A 'boy meets a girl' says nothing, but in almost all of Hitchcock's films, the meeting of a boy and a girl is central, after which the rest of the story follows automatically...