OPENING: Thursday 2 May 2019 from 17.30 hrs

From the 3rd of May, Foam 3h presents the work of Lilian Kreutzberger (1984, Netherlands). Kreutzberger is trained as a painter, but in her conceptual projects she combines photographic techniques with other media such as sculpture and architecture. In her project Whiteandgold && Blackandblue, the artist investigates the experience of material and space in the digital domain. Her multimedia work, which has a strong photographic dimension, is elusive and mysterious, and at the same time very tangible. Foam 3h displays a combination of reliefs, sculptural works and collages.

Although our computer contains a world without a sun, pictures still throw shadows. Digital books still have folded corners, we still drop unwanted files in the ‘trash can’. Multiple windows opened simultaneously and partially overlapping on our screen create a sense of depth. As such, the digital is full of references to our physical reality, even if it does not need to obey the law of nature. In Whiteandgold && Blackandblue, Lilian Kreutzberger explores this principle in reverse. She visualizes the digital reality in physical form, through which she explores the new possibilities within the digital medium. The shadows on her reliefs are illusory, frames fuse with the image they are supposed to enclose, and images detach themselves from their substrate. Images of surfaces overlap onto materials where they do not belong, or contain a blurriness that our eyes try to remedy in vain, like a projection that needs to be brought into focus.

By means of photography, painting and architectonic forms, Kreutzberger depicts the infinity of the digital dimension: an intangible reality that melts, is fleeting, or seems to take on an endless variety of shapes. Using a digital transfer technique, Kreutzberger transferred a photo of marble onto plaster, but the image appears to leak from the frame and obeys neither the substrate nor the shape. In another work, the frame seems to have a life of its own, framing everything and nothing at the same time. In this way, Kreutzberger highlights how the digital world has separated object and material: something can appear in 3D on our screen, without having a tangible shape. Without tangibility, and devoid of physical material origins, all that remains is the experience of images on the digital screen. Kreutzberger’s work is also a commentary on the staggering amount of photographs that flit across our screens every day, often without ever taking the form of a physical, tangible print.

Remarkably, the work Supersurface was previously nominated for the Royal Award for Modern Painting. The fact that it will now be on display in a photography museum underlines Kreutzberger’s belief that this work is equally at home within the context of painting and of photography. The relief, which represents dripping marble, plays with our visual expectations. It appears undefinable – are we seeing marble, a picture of marble, a painting of marble? – and in this way plays with the endless possibilities that come with translating the digital information to a tangible form. Her artistic research does not allow itself to be captured into one single medium, but requires a multimedia approach that shakes the traditional notions of both painting and photography.

Lilian Kreutzberger graduated from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, obtained her MFA at the Parsons New School in New York, and completed the post-academic programme at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. She was artist-in-residence at Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology and at ISCP, Brooklyn, New York. She was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and won the Buning Brongers Award. She was nominated for the Royal Award for Modern Painting in 2017. Her work has been exhibited at (a.o.) the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag; Royal Palace, Amsterdam; the World Expo 2010, Shanghai; The Last Brucennial and The Kitchen, New York. Lilian Kreutzberger is represented by CINNNAMON, Rotterdam.

Lilian Kreutzberger’s project was developed with support of the Mondriaan Fund.

This exhibition is made possible with support of the Gieskes-Strijbis Fund and the Van Bijlevelt Foundation.

Foam is supported by the BankGiro Lottery, De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek, Foam Members, City of Amsterdam, Olympus and the VandenEnde Foundation.