With great pleasure we invite you to the duo exhibition WILD, with work by Bas Kosters and Johan Kleinjan. The two artists have a great admiration for each others work. They chose Wild as a theme only to find out that they are not so wild anymore and that something wild is hard to find these days. With great humour, they both give their view of the world in this exhibition, in a visual language that is a world in itself.
As an artist and designer, Bas Kosters (1977) is driven by commitment and compassion. He creates worlds inhabited by radiant, alarming and endearing figures that reflect his social engagement. No matter the discipline, Bas works vigorously and with enthusiasm, but he is especially fond of textile and graphic art, which he uses to express and celebrate personal and societal themes. He approaches difficult emotions in a light-footed way, with subtle and sometimes wry humor and his trademark texts. Bas’ fascination for cartoon characters, visualizations and erotica leads to a reality full of friction, full of different views that compete for your attention.
"I think what I like most about the word 'wild' is that when you put it in front of something, it immediately makes it a lot. That makes me wildly enthusiastic.”
Bas Kosters
His first thought about the theme of the exhibition was something with sex: naked cocks, tits, pussies. Then he found a plastic garden gnome that looked like a woman who had undergone extreme plastic surgery. That gnome became a leitmotiv for the textile works in the exhibition. He bought old carnival costumes and cut them apart to make sex dolls. They became large stuffed cuddly dolls made of all kinds of fabrics, including a digital fabric print of sex photos with Bas's face as a gnome.
The dolls form an installation in the gallery, where they hang in the air on ropes like the surprises in Ria Bremer's Stuif es in. In addition, wild drawings are on display: images with trembling lines and wobbly eyelashes, a sexy transvestite on a bed with stockings, cars with legs and furry wild animals.
Johan Kleinjan (1974) works in a distinctive unpolished style with an unusual use of colour. His works of art arise from his fascination with strange, but sometimes also just everyday things. To name a few: the contestants of Tempation Island, plants, the victims of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and buildings.
Johan made his not so wild summer wild by watching Cathode tv, an online channel for experimental films. The low budget horror films in particular appealed to him and were a source of inspiration. For example, he drew the Melting Man, a kind of melting zombie, and a priest in a scene from the Devils, a controversial British-American historical drama film that is still banned. Johan also saw wild as animals that are not wild. Like a good-natured poodle that he encountered at night in Chongqing when he was out with a Chinese graffiti crew painting a mural. He also drew a cat sleeping on a water pipe to cool down from the heat.
