Galerie Larik / Nothing is the same

Galerie Larik presents ‘Nothing is the same’ curated by artist duo Sander Breure & Witte van Hulzen. Breure & van Hulzen are currently working in AIR Pastoe, a residency in the HKU location Pastoe Fabriek, where the 3rd and 4th year students of HKU Fine Art also have their studio spaces. This AIR offers a special working period from October 2021 to March 2022 and is made possible by the Keep an Eye Foundation. The curators chose for ‘Nothing is the same’ paintings and sculptures by 5 talented students, Zazi Creijghton, Hannah Konings, Sabina Lapteanu, Chiou Mian Lin and Lorenço, from year 3 of HKU Fine Art. A great opportunity for the students to show their work in a professional setting and for Galerie Larik and HKU Fine Art a first step towards  fruitful future collaboration.

There are many reasons to doubt this statement, because in our daily experience, a lot of things are the same. Houses and apartments are stuffed with mass produced IKEA furniture, populated by people dressed in H&M clothing, who occasionally take a stroll through the aisles of Unilever products in their local supermarket. Facing this sameness, art resists. And art doesn’t resist this life experience on anti-capitalist grounds—although it might, and probably with good reason too—more fundamentally, it resists because it wants to imbue every object with an individual story and meaning. With a soul, you could say. So rather than rejecting the IKEA couch, art embraces it and says: Ikvår, you are not one, you are many! Your creator gave you a name, but made the mistake to give you all the same name. Because every Ikvår is unique, individual and special, and I, art, I love all of you! I will give all of you your own name! It is this almost impossible task that five young artists in this exhibition have taken upon themselves: to live by the idea that nothing is the same, and give proof by experience. And to our opinion, they succeed gloriously. Even the tired, endlessly abused imagery of Van Gogh (printed on thousands of cups, t-shirts, posters, etc) has been given a new lease of life, is painted again, and seen anew. Dried out apples and pears are visual reminders showing us that unnoticed by our daily gaze, time is doing its work and ever so slowly is continuously changing everything, transforming matter before our eyes without us seeing it. The artists whose works we see here don’t work with the materials that are deemed valuable in and of themselves but prefer the scraps, bits and pieces, the old and tired images, or some old socks, that through the alchemic creation process in the artist studio are transformed and turned into something new. Who knew a painting can shed its skin like a snake? 

Participating artists:
Chiou Mian LinHannah Konings Lorenço Sabina LăpteanuZazi Creyghton