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SUZANNE JONGMANS
In het werk van Suzanne Jongmans voel je de liefde voor het ambacht van de meesters uit de 15e, 16e en 17e eeuw. Hun van symboliek doortrokken portretkunst vormt het kader waarbinnen ze haar eigen verhaal vertelt.
Het beginpunt van een werk ligt vaak in een vraag uit haar persoonlijk leven. Over liefde en verlies, het vinden van moed, het maken van de juiste keuzes. De materialen waarmee ze de kostuums voor haar modellen maakt komen soms uit de natuur, bijvoorbeeld bloemen of schapenwol, maar ze gebruikt ook stukken plastic of piepschuim. De ideeën en beelden die gaandeweg ontstaan geven meer inzicht in het vraagstuk dat haar bezighoudt.
Na het maken van honderden detailopnames met een model volgt een lang proces van nabewerken om het uiteindelijke beeld te creëren. Ze gebruikt de vele fotografische lagen zoals de oude meesters hun verf gebruikten.
Voortdurend zoekt ze naar de balans tussen de uiterlijke en haar innerlijke wereld, en daarbij draait het steeds om contrasten. Tussen klassiek en hedendaags, licht en donker, levenservaring en kinderlijke puurheid, het hier en nu en het eeuwige. De symboliek raakt aan universele ervaringen, maar is tegelijk persoonlijk. Zo is elk werk ook een zelfportret te noemen.
‘She creates a tension and a meeting between the classical and the modern, the constant and the fugitive. Her images radiate an immanence, through the mundane scraps, we glimpse the divine.’
Karen Van Godtsenhoven, associate curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York)
‘Dutch artist Suzanne Jongmans creates photographs that echo the old masters, but with a modern twist’
The Observer
Suzanne Jongmans (Breda, The Netherlands, 1978) is interdisciplinair kunstenares. Ze is coupeuse, beeldhouwer, kostuumontwerper en fotografe. Ze studeerde textieldesign en fotografie aan de academie voor Beeldende Vorming in Tilburg. Naast een grote opdracht voor het Italiaanse modehuis Moncler i.s.m. Valentino verscheen een documentaire over haar op ‘Die Deutsche Welle’, kreeg ze aandacht op CNN, Washington Post, een solotentoonstelling bij het European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) en een expo in het Welt museum in Wenen.
Education
1996-2000 Academie Voor Beeldende Vorming Tilburg
graduated in Textile Design and Photography
Photo by Piet den Blanken
Selected Solo and Group Exhibitions
2022
Design & Dynastie, Stadspaleis Fulda, DE
Undivided Attention, Solo, Gasunie Groningen, NL
Vorm aan de vecht – Buitenplaats Doornburgh /Priorij, Maarssen, NL
Black Gold Museum, Riyadh SA
2021
Things Matter – Staatsgalerie Stuttgart DE
Dialogues – musée Massay, Tarbes FR
Kunst & Kunststof, De Domijnen, Sittard NL
PAN Amsterdam NL
Masterly The Hague NL
KunstRAI Amsterdam
2019
PAN Amsterdam, Galerie Wilms NL
Waldorf Astoria Amsterdam NL
Moving through contrast, (solo) Galerie Wilms NL
Modest Fashion, Stedelijk Museum Schiedam NL
CITTÀ DI VELLUTO, Ala, IT
Kindred Spirits, EESC Brussels BE
Munch Fabric Start, Munchen DE
2018
Assignment of 3 artworks commissioned by Valentino / Moncler Italy
“Veiled, Unveiled! The Headscarf, Welt museum Wenen, AU
PAN Amsterdam, Galerie Wilms
2017
American embassy, Galerie Wilms
PAN Amsterdam, Galerie Wilms
KunstRAI (solo), Amsterdam, Galerie Wilms
The Duchess, Amsterdam
SALON/CRAFT, Amsterdam
Geldrop Museum (solo)
Miscellaneous II, Venlo Galerie Wilms
10 jaar Galerie Wilms Lustrum tentoonstelling
Kindred Spirits, Solo, Galerie Wilms - Venlo
Rotterdam Contemporary Art Fair 2017, Galerie Wilms
2016
PAN Amsterdam, Galerie Wilms
Tuin der Kunsten, Galerie Wilms, Venlo
Tuin der Kunsten, Museum van Bommel van Dam, Venlo
Miscellaneous II, Galerie Wilms, Venlo
2015
Yip art Fotoveiling
Museum de Kantfabriek, Horst
Cacoafabriek , Helmond
PAN Amsterdam, Galerie Wilms, Amsterdam
Kunstrai, Galerie Wilms, Amsterdam
Art the Hague, Galerie Wilms, Amsterdam
Realisme, Galerie Wilms, Amsterdam
2014
PAN, Galerie Wilms, Amsterdam
Mind over Matter, Solo, Galerie Wilms, Venlo
Museum van Bommel Van Dam, Verzameling Venlo, Venlo
(Work is included in the museum collection)
Art The Hague, Galerie Wilms, The Hague
a Group show, Gallery Stephanie Hoppen, London
Amphia Ziekenhuis, Solo, Breda
Art Realisme, Galerie Wilms, Amsterdam
KunstRAI, Galerie Wilms, Amsterdam
2013
Art The Hague, Galerie Wilms, The Hague
Through a Glass Darkly, Gallery Stephanie Hoppen, London
LAPADA, Gallery Stephanie Hoppen, London
KunstRai, Galerie Wilms, Amsterdam
Museum ’t Oude Slot, Solo, Veldhoven
Art Realisme, Galerie Wilms, Amsterdam
2012
KunstRai, Galerie Wilms, Amsterdam
Art Realisme, Galerie Wilms, Amsterdam
2011
It's a Wrap, KOP, Breda
Suzanne Jongmans, Galerie Wilms, Venlo
Zomerexpositie, Gemeentemuseum, The Hague
De Museumwinkel, Galerie Ecker, Breda
Mail Art Project, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven
Group exhibition, De Krabbedans Eindhoven
2010
Essent-Foyer, Chassetheater, Breda
Arti, Galerie Pennings, Den Haag
Stik maar, Museum Kempenland, Eindhoven
Solo, Galerie Pennings, Eindhoven
2009
Oog in oog, KOP, Breda
Duetten, Galerie Ecker, Breda
2008
Openstudio route, Breda Photo, Breda
2007
Duo exhibition, Galerie Wilms, Venlo
Identity, KOP, Breda
Front, Solo exhibition, Chassétheater Breda
Harry Pennings estafetteprijs, Galerie Pennings, Eindhoven
Publications
Die Welle - documantery about Suzanne Jongmans 2019
The Grid - The Guardian/ The observer 2018
Salzburger Nachrichten
NTR Zaterdag Matinee, 2017
Boekrecensie in Brabant Cultureel 2015
Philomagazine 2015
Residence 2015
Valentino 2015
'Holland Herald' the inflight magazine of KLM 2015
Palet 2014
Selvedge Magazine (58), Paper, scissors, shoot, Sue Steward, 2014, UK
NRC, Rebelse kunstwerken in kasteel Keukenhof,
Sandra Smallenburg, 2013, NL
Palet, Oude Meesters in nieuwe foto’s,
Thijs van Kimmenade, 2013, NL
Eindhovens Dagblad, Portretten met
een knipoog, Rob Schoonen, 2013, NL
Washington Post, Flemish art, back to
the future , Maura Judkis, 2012, USA
Brabant Cultureel, De kwetsbaarheid van Suzanne Jongmans, Irma van Bommel, 2011, NL
‘Stillevens’ in Tortuga (28) 2011
Elsevier, Moderne Vermeer, Ingrid van
der Chijs, 2010 NL
BLINK, Suzanne Jongmans, 2005
STATEMENT
Mind over Matter
De fotoportretten van Suzanne staan in de traditie van de 15e, 16e en 17e eeuw. Het werk refereert aan de schilderijen van de ‘oude meesters’ zoals Rembrandt, Holbein de Jongere en Rogier van der Weyden.
Suzanne Jongmans’ werk is interdisciplinair; ze is coupeuse, beeldhouwer én een kostuumontwerper. Vervolgens zet ze als fotograaf de driedimensionale beelden om naar het platte vlak. Voor het maken van haar kleding gebruikt ze verpakkingsmaterialen zoals foam en schuimrubber. Suzanne gebruikt dit foam zo geraffineerd dat het foam net zijde lijkt, het staat prachtig op de huid en het werkt als een beschermend schild voor haar modellen. Vanaf het moment dat ze het potentieel van het schuimrubber ontdekte, ontwikkelde ze een nieuwe manier van kostuums maken: ze beeldhouwt haar ontwerpen. De tradities van het beeldhouwen en kostuumontwerpen komen samen in haar serene foto’s. Het materiaal en de traditie gaan een complexe relatie aan; een kap van schuimrubber is tegelijkertijd modern als een referentie naar de portretten uit de Gouden Eeuw. Het materiaal is bedoeld als bescherming – maar tegelijkertijd heel verfijnd. Letters en symbolen op het verpakkingsmateriaal benadrukken het hergebruik en verwijzen naar de bescherming die het biedt aan kwetsbare en delicate oppervlakken.
Suzanne voegt met haar manier van kijken waarde toe aan simpel verpakkingsmateriaal. Het is alsof je het verleden in haar interpretaties van oude meesters bijna kan aanraken. Suzanne ’s werken zijn een tastbare geschiedenis van deze historische portretten én leggen een verbinding met haar eigen jeugd. Ze gebruikt het schuimrubber in haar kostuums zoals haar moeder en oma vroeger kleding maakte: met aandacht en liefde.
Het gebruik van restmateriaal is tevens een reactie op het heden en de massaconsumptie die ons omringt. ‘’De meeste mensen gooien schuimrubber weg, maar zoals een kind zie ik de diamant in een steen.” Dit levert onwaarschijnlijk mooie portretten op.
Suzanne Jongmans
Physical Contacts with History
A Textile Background
‘A textile background’ is how Suzanne Jongmans perfectly describes the impact of her observations on her mother’s and grand-mother’s hand-made textiles from her childhood and the clothes they sewed for themselves and their families.
Growing up in an atmosphere of crafting contributed to the young girl’s future as an artist. When she was eight, she moved house with her mother and brothers and was given her own room with a closet which she converted into a doll’s house of fantasies, a theatrical den she decorated and which unwittingly revealed an early interest in the use of space and design.
Alongside that focussed passion, Suzanne was drawn to her mother’s art books, particularly those of 15th,16th and 17th century painters. That interest grew at the Art Academy in Tilburg where her lecturer showed her books from his private collection and she studied works of Hans Holbein the Younger, Vermeer and Clouet for their radical compositions and play with light. They obviously influenced her future sculptural and photographic works.
She was drawn to this Art Academy because of the department Theatrical Design but when it closed down she decided on Photography and Textile Design building up conceptual and spatial ideas in multi-media installations. She extended work with textiles, photography and film and introduced traditional craft work which looped back into her childhood.
Since her academic training, Suzanne has retained a theatrical element in the work and her multi-media processes and productions now define her as a seamstress, pattern cutter, creator of sculptural forms, designer of costumes and a photographer who compresses images from their third dimension to the flat print.
The medium discovered
In 1997, the second year of her degree course, Suzanne won a student design prize for her debut installation, ‘Mijn huid, mijn littekens’, meaning “My skin, my scars.” Its significance lay in the extraordinary material she selected, sheets of thick foam. Its characteristics, the material’s flatness and agility makes it capable of returning to its original form and that led to her cutting pieces and meticulously sewing them. Stitches holding the garments together lie tightly across the fabric and suggest human scars.
The image Mind over Matter – Patience (2013) is a work that relates to this early installation, which she created as a tribute to the sculpture and the material it all began with.
Patience shows a young woman wearing a dress with lamb chop sleeves and a high neck ruff. Looking closer the noticeably stitched seam appears to be a scar and so displays the fragility and transience of what resembles human skin. It represents the impact of ‘impermanence and vulnerability’ on mind and body, she says, the patience of subject and artist. Suzanne commented, “Sometimes we can’t rush the process which takes time until wounds are healed.”
The images also exude serenity from the young women frozen in photographic time like the characters painted in centuries past. From a different angle of her work, the meticulousness of garments made by her grandmother and mother are challenged by Suzanne who breaks away from many of their sewing rules; in places, she leaves uncut threads dangling from hems and needles lying exposed on the surface of the foam clothing. But the inclusion of a thimble on the forefinger in Patience raises timeless memories of the tradition of generations of women.
After that initial experience in 1997, Suzanne began a decade later to re-use foam textiles in very different ways but still built on the same basis of her early creations. Suzanne’s earliest 2007 piece, Meisje met Kap (2007) was created in a moment of coincidence: she was making a test costume for a model and ran out of fabric but picked up fine sheets of the packing foam she used to protect her art works, which lay around in her studio. Suzanne said: ‘I wanted to make a mediaeval cloak without a construction and when I sewed it, it stood upright – a sculpture at once.’ Stitching the garment retrieved memories of the installation which won her the prize in 1997. This foam is thinner and semi-transparent but has the same capacity to create a foam sculpture. ‘Beautiful against the skin,’ says Suzanne, ‘It looks like silk and is like a protective shield for my model.’ Later garments worn by her young models are protected by the layer of translucent material resembling a second skin. ‘The presence of a model’s skin makes it vulnerable,’ says the artist and she emphasizes the significance of ‘Vulnerability and Transience’ in her investigations into texture and feel, presence and past.”Once she rediscovered its potential she created an original method of sculpting a garment and transforming it into a photographic art object. A more complex creation, an elegant, diaphanous wrap extending into a billowing hood, marks her earliest references to the Dutch era. Even advertisements for foam packing materials boast their soft textures and protection for sensitive and delicate surfaces – descriptions comparable with the materials she works with and the centuries-old silks almost tangible in the centuries old paintings of the young women who inspired her future work.
Mind over Matter
In the recent series titled “Mind over Matter,” Suzanne discusses her powers of observation. Since childhood she focussed on what she considers worthy of absorbing and using in her work. Her eye did the careful work in her doll’s house and later her investigative stares led to the realization that forms of plastic and foam can resemble lace or silk. And from there, she developed the detailed dress-making copied from mediaeval eras. She says that another reality exists by controlling and navigating the eye and mind and in recent works she controls what she sees in someone or something.
Since 2007, Suzanne has generated many surprises. The use of different varieties of packing foam and found materials reveal their re-use and inventiveness. ‘The idea of making something out of nothing changes our look on reality,’ she says, ‘A piece of plastic with text printed on it, used for packing a coffee machine or television can resemble a piece of silk. And the lid of a can of tomato puree can look like a ring.’ That large, abstract sculpted ring sits on the finger of the subject, Mind over Matter – Julie, Portrait of a Woman (2012) who was paired with Rogier van der Weyden’s Portrait of a Lady, 1460. The two young women separated by about half a millennium, similarly pose with fingers entwined and faces with modest expressions and down-cast eyes. They also share the pleated and visibly pinned cone-shaped head-dresses. A difference lies in the contemporary portrait’s red and black markings stamped onto the foam, instructions about recycling and warnings.
Her use of foam rubber simulates very accurately the caps and bonnets of girls and women’s swathed head-dresses, and the similarities she creates – but with subtle differences – from the wimples of mediaeval nuns to today’s beautiful variations on Islamic hijabs and head covers. The swing from past to present is now a constant in all of her subjects, materials and technologies.
Re-used
The recycling symbols visible in several recent works include the closed curves of a lemniscate ∞ printed on foam and plastic and symbolizing infinity and eternity. The models for Solitude, Voltar, Julie, Dame met Parel, Room for Change and Lied van de Parel are all involved in the equivalent cycle of matter recycled, interpretations re-used from 15th,16th and 17th century paintings. Mind over Matter – Infinity I shows an inverted hour-glass while in Mind over Matter – Infinity II, a little girl wearing a foam cap like a Vermeer character, holds in her fingers the infinity sign made with a red rubber band. The beautiful Mind over Matter – Voltar has a head-dress billowing with plastic sheeting scattered with symbols which include the lemniscate. But it also reveals a red hair-net emerging from under the head piece, material created from the bags holding oranges in the supermarkets.
Today’s symbols contrast with the allegoric objects seen in paintings of the Golden century. Pairing past with present. In Room for Change, the alluring whorl of plastic and polystyrene surrounding the head of the woman sees through the veil in a piece inspired by Rogier van der Weyden and where a butterfly on the model’s hand refers to ‘transformation.’
Another example of the dresses and head-wear replicating Masters’ paintings and accompanied by today’s versions, are the two young girls both poised to be married in different eras. Holbein’s masterpiece The Darmstadt Madonna (1525-28) sees the Madonna envelop Jakob Meyer’s Darmstadt family who is positioned around her. His daughter Anna, who kneels in profile, prays holding her red rosary and wearing carnations in her head-dress. Suzanne’s contemporary version, Mind over Matter – Gratitude, sees this Dutch girl, in her stunning, gossamer-thin ‘silk’ dress and her rosary beads made from rose hips – allegoric symbol of desire – and the carnation (Dianthus) she placed in her beautiful hairpiece. Like Anna’s, it represents commitment.
When Suzanne sews with strands of golden wire, in many cases they are visible and perfectly stitched. But with Mind over Matter – Praise of Folly, loose strands hang from the waistcoat wrapped around a dress. Together with the model who is turned from the camera in a uniquely concealed pose this gives a very 21st century feel. It was inspired by the manuscript written by Erasmus, published in 1511, and illustrated by Holbein the Younger. Erasmus wrote of ‘the wise folly, Stultitia’ who said, “It is from me, Stultitia, and from my influence only, that gods and men derive all mirth and cheerfulness.” The Folly’s waistcoat, made from stitched diamond shapes cut from rubber yoga matting leaves wires hanging off the seams and edges. Unusually, bells are scattered through her thick hair in this interesting back story.
A very different story lies in the Queen Elizabeth I image, Mind over Matter – Cutting Loose. The packing clip with its expiry date, scissors and the style of the dress refers to how she cut herself loose by cutting the puffed sleeves made of layers of insulation material, and releasing the dress which was as confining as her life. It simulates the familiar classic portraits of Elizabeth while maintaining their elegance, and in this full dress, she cut herself free.
The recent work titled Mind over Matter – Gravity, loops back to the work Meisje met Kap and reveals how much more complicated Suzanne’s creations have evolved with new materials, constructions and ideas, and influences from other early paintings. The short wrap worn by the young girl has a floating feel but the physical lightness of the external foam garment is covering and protecting the woollen lining. What stands out here is the graceful , symbolic presence of small metal weights hanging off the cloak’s hem and a link to the 17th century merchants who weighed gold in the Dutch markets.
The antithesis of lightness in these imaginative designs is the astonishing new ‘armour plating’ worn by male models ready for battle. For Mind over Matter – Infinity I, the surprise is in the panels cut out from foam rubber and the discarded yoga mats. Such changes in the materials used today are a convincing dedication to Suzanne’s response to the current, gross consumerism surrounding us. She pulls materials from waste bins and constructs these marvellous works from leftovers. “Most people throw that [the foam] away,” she says, ‘I make clothing out of it; foam is my textile.’
Her beautifully created phrase, ‘Textile Poetry’ drew from a mundane visual language, a significant reminder of the overwhelming amount of foam which would otherwise be lying in landfills instead of presenting things of beauty. “Like a child, I could see a diamond in a rock.”
Sue Steward. September 2014
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