KAHMANN Gallery Lindengracht 35 1015KB Amsterdam Pays-Bas
A surrealist world, located in the area of tension between photography, drawing and painting. A world inhabited by graceful, dreamlike and audacious creatures. This is the world of Schilte & Portielje.
The figures who play the lead role in the duo's photographic works are characterised by the mystery that surrounds them; a sort of intangibility, impenetrability. Elegance, power and intransigence seem to struggle with each other dominance. Alongside several older works, Kahmann Gallery will present a new series on which Schilte & Portielje have worked intensively for the last two years. This series shows even more clearly the influence of political and social developments. The figures often have an impertinent, brazen overtone with which they resist the curtailment of personal freedoms and preferences. Schilte & Portielje want to make a stand for tolerance and pluriformity, particularly in the current climate when everything is supposed to be manageable and orderly.
Over the years, Schilte & Portielje assembled an image bank full of image fragments that originated from hither and yon. Very selectively and independently of each other, they use sketches from this pool of images. In a lengthy and time-consuming process, these are then collated into an entirely new concept. During this process of endless refining, filling in, removing and adding, Schilte & Portielje complement each other seamlessly: where one of them stops creating, the other unerringly takes over. The new image continuously changes hands until both of them are completely satisfied, a process that can take weeks, months, sometimes even years. This results in wonderful works that contain the soft tones of a painting, the delicacy of a drawing and the authenticity of an analogue photograph. And because of the way in which they are presented, you can also pick up and put down the works as three-dimensional objects.
Kahmann Gallery will publish a special catalogue to coincide with TRANSVERSE.