A worm cupboard, a hypnotic sea monster in an awkward glass aquarium and photos of Koos Buster's girlfriend in ceramic frames: a selection from The Big Everyone Works With Everyone Show. For this exhibition, befriended artists Anemoon Fokkinga, Koos Buster, Jan Hoek and Gert Wessels created new works of art together. They challenged each other to work in new media and to explore the boundaries between design and art. The result is a gesamtkunstwerk that immerses you in a world where the strange is celebrated and where the pleasure of making art can be felt.
Jan Hoek, Rosa, 2022
About the artists
Anemoon Fokkinga (NL, 2003) uses her inner demons, pain and limitations as inspiration for her fantastic ceramic objects in which the many eyes, tentacles, rows of horns and tongues fight for attention. Her artworks range from objects like appealing tea sets and jewellery to sculptures of monstrous creatures that come from the deepest depths of the sea and Anemoon's fantasy world. For this exhibition, she was inspired by the Fukushima disaster and the mutated marine life that resulted from it. She shows that nature always finds its way. When people are gone, animals take over.
Koos Buster (NL, 1991) catapulted himself onto the Dutch art world in 2018 with the presentation of his already legendary Grote Koos Buster Museum, his graduation presentation at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. It caused a ceramics renaissance in the Netherlands, Buster was appointed as The Minister Of Ceramic Affairs. In his work Buster is always looking for the perfect doltish perfection or something trivial that deserves to be celebrated. The 'clumsiness' of a quick sketch often has the lines he wants to see in the final work. Among his most well known work are a ceramic water cooler, Canta, scooter and the series Ornamental Plates Of Almost Everything Koos Buster Doesn't Like.
Jan Hoek (NL, 1984) is always attracted to the beauty of outsiders worldwide and always keen to collaborate intensively with people that normally are overlooked and create together a new image. He photographed movie stars like Nairobi based motor taxi riders and the activists, fashion icons and proud trans sex workers Sistaaz of the Castle. He is the founder of the Captain Hoek foundation and Outsiderland, through which he aims to bring together the world of insider and outsider artists. In the universe of Hoek the ‘normal’ people are the strangers and the outsiders are the funky rulers of this planet.
The design objects of Gert Wessels (NL, 1994) make us look differently at everyday objects. He was the first artist to solve one of mankind's biggest problems: how to make a beautiful extension cord. His work explores the relationship between form and function in a process in which he allows himself to be led by chance. His typical forms are created in an ephemeral and reactive manner by cutting and sawing in polyurethane foam, after which he fixes the object in fibreglass and acrylic composite. Wessels has previously worked with artists such as Ben Becker and Jan Hoek. In this exhibition, he shows his freest work to date, and his objects become works of art.
