IKOB | Grootjans, Loek

Loek Grootjans

* 1955 in Netherlands

Lives and works in Netherlands.

To speak of LOEK GROOTJANS work is in part to speak of a framework in which his work has its place. It is within this framework that he established the Foundation for Research and Understanding of Interdependencies in 1998. This foundation is composed of several departments, sub-departments and areas that have branched out over the years.

At the end of the 1980s, he began to make purely monochrome paintings. These originate from an experiment Grootjans conducted in 1988. He locked himself up for a month in a room without light. This led him to "see" two colors: green and brown. This experience with color led the artist to focus exclusively on brown and green monochrome paintings. In 1998, Loek Grootjans emptied his studio and removed all the leftover paint, down to the last splashes on the floor. He collected these paint chips in a petri dish and called them The Final Remains of a contemporary monochrome Painter.

For his project Storage for Distorted Matter (2008 to present), Loek Grootjans has collected almost everything: bottles containing traces of great masters, his own dirt, the ground on which Vincent van Gogh was born, masterpieces of the twenty-first century that cannot be manufactured, water in which drowned people have washed up in Vlieland, the light that Piet Mondrian first saw when he came to Domburg.

Loek Grootjans, Dept. Questioning, part eleven (last part)

Dept. Questioning, part eleven (last part), 2009

Loek Grootjans, Spotting the Urban Strategy

Spotting the Urban Strategy, 2006