All season sanctuary Group Show

d'Ouwe Kerke
Dorpsstraat 16
4525 AH Retranchement
The Netherlands

Alma Allen, Neïl Beloufa, Paloma Bosquê, Varda Caivano, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, Paulo Nazareth, Hamish Pearch, Hariel Revignet and Miranda Fengyuan Zhang.

In its third edition, Mendes Wood DM returns to the 17th-century deconsecrated church in the village of Retranchement, on the Dutch border with Belgium, to open its summer show All season sanctuary, named after the sculpture by the US American artist Matthew Lutz-Kinoy displayed in the exhibition.

Before a place for worship, the disused protestant church of d’Ouwe Kerke gathers a group of artworks that dilates the meaning of transcendence by deconstructing conventional systems of representations, each one on their own terms. All season sanctuary presents a hybrid territory composed of sculptures, paintings, and mixed mediums stimulated by the encounter of different dichotomies, such as industrial and organic, order and disorder, real and imaginary, ephemeral and permanent, besides autobiogeographic practices facing racial and gender fights and the consumer and mediatic contemporary society.

With a recent solo exhibition at Lulu by X Museum in Mexico City, Varda Caivano’s abstract work, somewhere between drawing and painting, presents to the show its own nature to come alive. Having the material world as source, Paloma Bosquê, who together with Caivano will have a solo show at Mendes Wood DM in Brussels in November, brings two sculptures created during her residency at Fondation CAB, in which she continued her investigation about the emergence of forms from unusual materials.

Sharing their Afro-Brazilian roots and the country’s social and racial issues, Hariel Revignet’s ancestral figurative mixed paintings are displayed together with Paulo Nazareth’s sacra-popular works, in which Nazareth changes the status of products used in Catholic festivals by placing them on pedestals and eternalizing in resin their expiration dates, together with his cemetery of cement soccer balls. Instigated by the instance before an event and by the contrast of materials with highly industrialized aspect with organic forms, Hamish Pearch’s new body of work consolidates time and plays with its duration. Also, in the encounter between the organic and the inorganic, Alma Allen, who participated in a show at Rockefeller Center in New York this year and is being currently exhibited at Lustwarande, marks his presence in Retranchement with a biomorphic sculpture created out of bronze.

In addition, All season sanctuary includes works made with handwoven cotton by the Chinese artist Miranda Fengyuan Zhang, contrasting with Neïl Beloufa’s ironic heavy sculpture made with concrete, epoxy resin, cardboard and neon lights. Matthew Lutz-Kinoy doesn’t only mark the title of the show, but also brings large format colourful paintings occupying the vertical lines of the building that each summer contributes to different forms of transcendence.