NAP+ 2024

Niko Riedinger

Tim Breukers

Through sculpture, installation and collage, Tim Breukers (Breda, NL, 1985) tries to make new meaningful connections between material, a situation and himself. Important roles are played by scale, humour, narrative and sculptural techniques versus clumsy solutions. He believe that art helps balance our lives and that our lives help the art in becoming human and true. Breukers works a lot with clay, from which he makes gigantic sculptures. It led to his self-chosen nickname Clayminator. In recent years, his practice has become increasingly diverse, including sculptures made from tin cans inspired by a residency in Curaçao. Since the birth of his child, the subject of fatherhood has also been an important theme in his work. This can be seen, for instance, in the work Lui, luier luist: a mini tower of piled-up nappies, which he had cast in aluminium. The artist did numerous residencies in Willemstad, Kolkata, Seoul and the EKWC in Tilburg. Breukers was also a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. His work is included in several museum collections, including Centraal Museum Utrecht, Design Museum ‘s-Hertogenbosch and The Duth Pinball Museum

Tom Volkaert

Tom Volkaert’s sculptural work is a testimony to the materiality of memory as much as it is an ongoing tribute to the spiritual and shamanic force of art. Born in Antwerp in 1989, Volkaert’s sculptural work is a carefully balanced combination of refined artistic craftsmanship and the strategic use of unpredictability that comes into play when working with enameled ceramics, epoxy, or oxidized metal. Many of his works consist of circles on legs, which the artist likes to call steering-wheels. These works are like totems: symbolic and organic artifacts that make present the otherworldly alien life in the cosmos and that put us in touch with something radically different from us. On the edges and inside these circles, contorted arachnoid limbs, intestines, and sickly satanic tongues are carefully arranged and held in suspended animation. It is as if these circles are portals to another cosmic dimension and something wholly other than human life is trying to get through, a lumpy otherworldly and alienated organic gesturing at us in a way that feels both familiar and estranging. But Volkaert’s so-called steering wheels are also a totem for his own life and memories, a way of navigating and coming to terms with his own life. For Volkaert, colors embody memory. Personal memories first of all. And thus, the lived memory of the cinereous cigarette stains on the caput morteem colored carpet in his parent’s living room is reenacted and relived through the use of these colors in his work. But universal memories too. The usage of umbilical greyish pink and placenta-colored red appeal to a birthing process all of us have gone through; engaging with these colors, Volkaert’s sculptures establish a connection to the matrixial mother in which all creativity is situated, making the viewer receptive to the most intimate and estranging experience of being alive. Conjuring up these contradictory feelings and holding them together is, ultimately, at the core of Volkaert’s artistic practice. Holding together contradictory sensations, his art opens a space where feelings of joy, surprise, wonder, and disgust are enclosed in the same ceramic totem or metal cut-out or epoxy statues. Text : Bram Leven