32 years after first exhibiting together at art & project, Nicholas Pope and Toon Verhoef show recent work alongside selected works from 1977 to 1982 at Galerie Onrust, Amsterdam. In 1979 art & project opened a new space on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam. Pope showed stone and wood sculpture in the downstairs gallery, Verhoef his characteristic vertical elongated paintings in the upstairs rooms.
Nicholas Pope describes his work from this period as (being about) “the material and the space and the surrounding values it, the work, was in”. Toon Verhoef’s work from that time show tentative structures, probing forms, in an uneasy connection to the format.
In the 1980’s Pope was a frequent visitor to the Netherlands, showing at art & project, KröllerMüller Museum (1981), Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (1993), completing important public sculpture commissions in Amsterdam and Utrecht and teaching at de Ateliers. Although their work differs greatly, they enjoy an enduring friendship, which Nicholas Pope describes as follows in a recent email: “I think we should be careful on the title so we don’t overreach, obviously the two dates are significant but we don’t want to give the idea that there is work from all the 32 years – of course we didn’t know each other before the first exhibition and in a way we now know each other better than each other’s work, because when I see you I think about you rather than your work, whereas artists I know less well I think about their work and not them. So for me the surprise will be seeing the work together after so much shared history of 32 years. There are probably few surprises for each of us in ourselves, for example we both know that if we have a meeting arranged the other will turn the last corner to the meeting place a couple of minutes before the meeting – what I am trying to say is there is trust in the friendship and surprise in the work because over the years we have never really talked about our work, we just see itwhen we see it. That’s what I like about our friendship.”
About his recent work Pope writes: “Much of my later work is still about materials and space but I hope it also shows the place where I am – much more about me and mine – rather than the world of art.” “Holes and vacuums are about the importance of nothing.”
Verhoef’s new paintings picture his absorption in an artificial, anonymous, constructed visual vocabulary – some paintings intrude in earlier work, other paintings were started by him, reworked by Simone Häfele, and taken up again by him in an attempt to destabilise conventions and expectations.
