Job Koelewijn
30: The World is My Oyster
Galerie Fons Welters - Front Space
19 May – 18 Jun 2016
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‘Galerie Fons Welters closes the gallery season with a sledgehammer, not with a little tap’, Jhim Lamoree wrote on Friday June 28th, 1996 in het Parool on the exhibition ‘The World is My Oyster’ by Job Koelewijn. For this 1996 show, Koelewijn removed the back wall of the gallery, at the size of a soccer goal, letting in a precisely framed part of reality, the neighbouring garden. A simple gesture, accomplished with sledgehammer blows.
Some exhibitions take on a life on their own in the imagination and memory. In the tradition they do not only live on, but they become a metaphor for the artistic practice of an artist, or the conduct of a gallery. Job Koelewijn's exhibition 'The World Is My Oyster’ is such an exhibition. The critics were divided, they appointed the aggressive act, and marveled at the other elements that were featured in the exhibition. While years later it took on a new meaning and grew in perception.
In honor of and on the occasion of its "thirtieth" anniversary, the gallery dedicates its exhibition program in the front space – known to all regular visitors for years as Playstation – to the archive of the gallery, its artists and exhibitions. Retrospective in view, these series of exhibitions tell the subjective story of a time frame, from memory, but also from her contemporary reinterpretation. What does it mean to look back on an exhibition which was narrated only in documentation and memory?
For this series of exhibitions Gabriel Lester developed a series of architectural interventions, which, like the exhibition program, develop slowly and multiply over time.