Bloody Hell & Lucylures

Welkenhuysen, Frank e.a., ‘Margriet Smulders : Bloody Hell & Lucylures’, Utrecht 2008
ISBN 978-90-79462-04-9

NRC Handelsblad




Grote doeken maakt Jan van der Pol, met dikke verfstreken in matte, vrij sombere kleuren. Zwart, roze en grijze tinten domineren. Het robuuste werk van de deelexpositie De schoonheid van het (ons) tranendal krijgt alle ruimte aan de witte wanden van de Haagse Galerie Nouvelles Images. Op het schilderij Ochtend 1 zitten aan de bovenkant enkele rijen pastelgekleurde ovalen vormen. Het onderste gedeelte van het doek is gehuld in een grijze nevel.  In de verte lichten rode koplampen op van een zwarte auto. Linksonder is een lichtgele schim te zien, een suggestie van beweging. Een passerende fietser? Iemand die zich snel uit de voeten maakt?
De uitstraling van het werk van de andere exposant, Margriet Smulders staat bijna lijnrecht tegenover de schilderijen van Van der Pol. Ook Smulders  maakt grote werken, zoals bijvoorbeeld Bloody Roses (181 x 239) of Tulips for Ensor (125 x 190). Maar haar foto's - stillevens is eigenlijk een beter woord - zijn juist vrouwelijk, kleurrijk en sensueel. De voorstelling is de ene keer stemmig en geheimzinnig, zoals die met de opengesneden granaatappels en drijvende rozenblaadjes tegen een donkerrode achtergrond waar vooraan in het beeld nog een paar granaatappelpitjes dobberen. Een andere  keer zit er een geestige knipoog in, zoals in Bacchus' Tree,  een werk waarin de kleur groen overheerst en waarin bijna  kaalgegeten druivenrankjes hangen.
Wanneer je voor zo'n enorme uitvergroting staat, met diepte, water en sterke kleuren in combinatie met (delen) van bestaand materiaal uit de natuur, voel je vooral vervreemding en verwondering. Het is niet abstract, maar evenmin realistisch.
Voor haar werk bouwt Smulders in haar atelier een soort theaterdecor met gekleurde draperieën rondom een grote spiegel waar een rand op gemonteerd is zodat er water in kan.  De kleur van de draperieën is bepalend voor de basissfeer van het stilleven. Rondom, erboven en in de bak manipuleert, hangt en schikt Smulders net zo lang met  planten, bloemen, vruchten en andere plantaardige materialen tot ze tevreden is met het resultaat van de compositie. Dan begint ze te fotograferen. Smulders maakt gebruik van de cibachrome techniek omdat die lichtechtheid garandeert en de kleuren door een   juiste belichting nog meer diepte krijgen. Smulders vertelt dat ze al met de waterbak werkt sinds 1999, maar dat er sinds kort een hogere rand op is gemonteerd waardoor ze ook vissen door het beeld kan laten zwemmen. ,,Ik fotografeer het opgebouwde beweeglijke stillleven samen met één of meerdere assistenten, die helpen met water gooien, vissen de goede kant uit te laten zwemmen en dergelijke."
Ook figureren er nu paddestoelen in haar werk en, zo vertelt ze, in het meest recente werk ontbreken de bloemen zelfs helemaal al verwacht ze dat die zeker wel weer terugkomen. "Ik ben al van jongs af aan bezig met bloemen."

Marion van Eeuwen

Jan van der Pol, Margriet Smulders.
T/m 27 febr. in  Galerie Nouvelles Images, Westeinde 22, Den Haag.
Di t/m za 11-17u. Inl: 070-346 19 98, www.nouvellesimages.nl

  

EXIT 28, Flowers



Endless garlands of flowers curled around the borders of my note pads when I was a school girl. And thousands of roses were cut out from my mother’s gardening books. At the Academy of Arts, flowers as large as life were painted on my canvasses. There were always flowers. They flourished in the self-portraits of the eighties and grew bigger in the flower wallpapers made in the nineties.
You can see a whole world in my flowers. Lush and strangely erotic tableaux entice you into another dimension.  Huge mirrors, elaborate glass vases, rich draperies, fruit and cut blooms are used to make these 'paintings'.
As Baudelaire says “Get drunk: on wine, poetry or virtue”. Imagine lingering and languishing in these fresh, sultry and lucid landscapes. I love this sensual state. To lose myself, to deliver myself as in a love affair. Reality doesn't matter. When making photos I get lost in the scenes as if the flowers were caressing me in the gulfs of the sea.
Kienholz, Sherman and the Dutch painters of the seventeenth century were my masters when making a series of my life as a young woman and mother. These self portraits showed my family life as an embarrassed, querulous paradise: less than perfect. In these theatrical scenes flowers were used as a backdrop. Gradually when making commissioned portraits I began to see people as flowers.
Later the floral paintings of the 17th century, the works of Pollock and Kiefer, the strong scenes of Pipilotti Rist and the seductive work of Bettina Rheims would inspire me. In 1999 an exhibition on voluptuous Dutch floral still-lives of our Golden Age was in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. At that time I began to 'paint' floral still-life compositions with the help of a mirror, so that the total looked richer, more generous and more highly scented, with purple irises, ragged orange tulips and crumpled lips of full-blown petals that appear to be moving in the rippled waters. The effect is like looking into a clear pond, where rivulets of pure water descend from glacial protrusions.
But not all of the flowers are immaculate or in pristine condition, suggesting that something potentially nasty could take place, as in Greek mythology, which is replete with instances of fratricide and revenge. Insects, frogs, drops of blood and red juice on pallid blooms make the photographs slightly sinister. Darkness gives them an unknown and mysterious depth. In these theatres not only domestic scenes but the whole world with its relationships and dramas is played out by flowers as actors.

Margriet Smulders
    
  

Two texts published in Get Drunk

The still lifes of the 17th and 18th century are characteristic for the Dutch partiality and pictorial virtuosity: not one country has produced this amount and quality of still lifes and not one category of painting shows more clearly the Dutch reverence for all things real. One of the oldest and most beloved types of still life is the flower arrangement. The tradition of floral still life was continuously pursued by the Amsterdam painter Jan van Huysum (1682-1749) who specialised in detailed flower- and fruits-capes. The 18th century biographer Johan van Gool called him the ‘phoenix of  floral painters’, using his work as evidence that a contemporary painter was able to equal or even excel artwork of earlier painters.
Three decades later Margriet Smulders has succeeded in this with her baroque floral still lifes. Her photographic work fully stands in the still life tradition of the 17th century. With great precision and subtleness she assembles complex compositions out of exotic flowers and ripe fruit, skilfully making use of their reflections in water and mirrors. Her floral still lifes seem closer to painting than to photography.
Smulders is second to none when it comes to the art of seduction. In her carefully arranged compositions of flowers, very meticulously depicted, stands Flora, the goddess of flowers and the personification of the growth of divine nature, at the centre. Flora’s realm is the garden, a gift of Zephyrus, the west wind, who begot flowers by her.
The abundant floral still lifes by Margriet Smulders often represent the enclosed garden in the Song of Songs 4:12-16, in which the groom compares his bride with a garden. The bride is a spring surrounded by gardens, a well with fresh water, a rill of Lebanon. The well of fresh water refers to the fountain in the garden of Eden in the book of Genesis, that turned the barren desert into a fertile place.

Daniëlle H.A.C. Lokin
Director Museum Het Prinsenhof, Delft

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Margriet Smulders

The photographic floral still lifes by Margriet Smulders teem with colour and profusion. The luxurious splendour of the flowers extends to all corners of the large-size photos. Smulders stands in the tradition of the very Dutch floral still life filled however with a full dose of the southern temperament.

The extravagant baroque is a southern style that is unfamiliar to the Dutch northerners. Lofty abundance does not fit in the Dutch tradition of (moralistic) realism and sober formalism. Does something like ‘Dutch’ art really exist? Yes, it does. Though bookshelves could be filled in trying to explain its true nature, the following few key words could well apply: modest, precise, angular. Just look at 17th century painting. Painters like Vermeer and (his fellow companions of the interior perspective) Saenredam, Heda (as the synecdoche of the vanitas still life painting), Dou, van Mieris, van Velde, even Ruysdael and van Goyen, all possess a style that lends their work a certain grimness. There is no room for levity. Their genius primarily lies in a powerful realism, not in a joyful, sensual painter’s touch. For that you have to be with the Flemish and Italian painters. The only real exception is Frans Hals, but then he was from Antwerp, though he reached maturity in Haarlem. Rembrandt wavers somewhere in between: a loose touch, yet not that free and frivolous as Rubens.

The subject matter of Dutch painting did not lend itself to frivolities anyway. Art-with-a-message is rarely blessed with an easy hand for representation. This goes for the whole genre as well as for still life painting. Concerning the vanitas allegories it is acceptable, after all death does not know merriment. As to the pronkstilleven (pomp and splendour still life) it is even less within reach of the imagination, although in the end this métier, too, became subservient to the command of sublime representation, a feature that particularly qualified the 17th century. Often it seems more about displaying the painter’s technique than purely revealing nature’s full bounty, whether material or otherwise.
But what about the floral still lifes?

(...............)

With photography Smulders creates an experience which differs from painting indeed, yet her photographic work has its own intrinsic value. She can play with the dynamics of light and dark more emphatically, a quite personal photographic form of the claire obscure. In a number of works she inserted dark spots in the composition, tempting the gaze. One of these spots even looks almost like a cave, all the more reinforced by the sea-blue colouring. In other works the flower formations make a sort of garland around a more darkened centre. Again the 17th century comes to mind. Within the genre of the floral still life a group of painters specialised in garlands around a realistic depiction: a portrait, a religious or allegoric tableau. These works were often made by two painters: one did the tableau in the centre while the other painted the garland. In Smulders’ work the centre tableau is missing as a result of which more is left to the viewer’s imagination. A further element in Smulders’ work is the addition of all sorts of small animals: butterflies, little fish, frogs and insects as was common practice in the 17th century. It reinforces the power of the image that the artist tries to evoke.
Margriet Smulders’ photo-works are produced on very large formats (amongst others a panorama of 11 metres wide) thereby optimising the effect created. One gets swallowed up by a sea of flowers that lacks a natural logic, transforming it into one big adventure to travel endlessly with the eye. And to fill one with delight.

Robbert Roos, July 2006
     

Gallery Wäcker & Jordanow, Münich



One could be forgiven for thinking that these photographs by Margriet Smulders (born 1955) were paintings: the splendid flower arrangements in brilliant shades of red and purple are so bountiful and baroque that they could almost be by the Old Masters themselves.

These still lifes by the Dutch artist, who is very well known in her own country but has never had a solo exhibition in Germany, were "painted" with a camera. In these dense, dramatically staged compositions made up of flowers, blown glasses, reflecting mirrors and drops of water, the sumptuous diversity and passion of nature is evoked. These lavish images of flowers, proliferating from edge to edge of the picture and exhibiting the full range of forms and shades, oscillate between order and chaos, immobility and dynamism, thriving and decaying.

The entire Tulipomania series is devoted to tulips.
Following winter, the tulip is one of the first signs of nature's reawakening, a symbol of fertility and thus also of sensuality and vitality. The tulip unfolds its beauty when in full bloom, but even the wilting tulip can be stubbornly inspiring.
Margriet Smulders has been photographing flowers since 1996, initially as individual "portraits", later as "group photos" which became ever more spectacular and luxuriant, finding a temporary high point in her marvellous Siren series.
Margriet Smulders began to focus on the tulip in 2002, in the context of a large commissioned work for the Dutch embassy in Ankara. During the preparatory work for the 10 x 2.25 meter photograph inspired by Monet's Nympheas, she discovered the fascination of the many different new and old species of tulip. The tulip, which is mentioned in the Koran, symbolises the relations between Turkey and the Netherlands.

In the 2003 Tulipomania series Margriet Smulders continues her work with tulips. Through the colour and formal associations of the individual photographs she acknowledges artists such as Rembrandt, Matisse, Dufy, and also Pipilotti Rist and Bettina Rheims, whose works have inspired her in different ways.

The arrangements in Margriet Smulders' works take up the tradition of Dutch still life painting, which reached its peak in the 17th century with masterful paintings of flowers. Those lush paintings were intended as a symbolic reminder of man's transience and earthly vanity.

When Smulders toys with this symbolism, she not only awakens associations such as with Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal and their bombastic-erotic connotations, she also recalls the sexual symbolism of flower cups, and evokes the modern feminism of a Pipilotti Rist, who in her famous video breaks car windows with a flower.

Margriet Smulders' wondrously impenetrable worlds, whose ingredients are ultimately the artist's secret, are staged and arranged solely for the camera. By deliberately using kitsch as a stylistic tool which she combines with a great sense of beauty and symbolic power, the artist arrives at self-confident and unconventional variations of a traditional genre. She thus produces photographs that have an almost hypnotic force, are confusing and seductive and engender a whole new visual experience.

Margriet Smulders first studied painting and drawing at the Academy of Fine Arts in Arnheim, before opting for photography. In the early 1990s she took her series of self-portraits in different roles and portraits in arranged settings. To this day, portrait photography plays an important role in her work.
Works by Margriet Smulders are to be found in many public and private collections in the Netherlands as well as in Dutch foreign representations.

Dr.Erika Wäcker, München
   

Eyemazing Issue 2


 
Margriet Smulders’ lush and strangely erotic tableaux entice you into another world.  Using huge mirrors, elaborate glass vases, rich draperies and full-blown cut blooms, her seductive images seem closer to painting than photography. Smulders hasn't always taken photographs of snaking tendrils  tumbling out of grotesque and beautiful objects.  In the early 1990’s she was well known as a portrait photographer, using herself as a model for her distinctive family portraits.  Instead of replicating idyllic images of parents and children, she photographed moments when things were far from perfect.  In Maternité IX her children are crying rather than smiling at the camera, and a sense of theatre is emphasised by the blue velvet curtains draped around this subversive scene.  Smulders covered her miniature sets with chintz wallpaper and hung assorted limp undergarments to frame her contemporary Madonnas.  Playing unhappy families inside what look like grown-up dolls houses painted sickly sweet ice cream colours suggested that commercial (or even private) images of family life are often ‘unnatural’ and even deceptive.  It was hard to tell whether her version of domesticity was meant to seem oppressive or whether she was just alerting the viewer to the complex experience of being a mother, wife and artist.  However, there were incipient signs of her current interest in flowers even in these mini domestic theatres.

In 1996 she started photographing still lifes.  Her single stemmed flowers in old vases were tender anthropomorphic portraits in front of sky-blue backgrounds and Smulders still has her collection of pretty china on top of her rose wallpaper-lined cupboard.  However, these single blooms soon evolved into the extraordinary concoctions she produces now.  In some ways, the domestic theme has become deeper and more resonant, in that she often refers to Greek myths, many of which are replete with instances of fratricide and revenge.  Instead of depicting potential intense emotion in the modern family, in images such as Nausicaa and Demeter she refers to ancient tales of love, rivalry, jealousy and bloodshed using abstract imagery.

Her recent series of irises in the series Drunkenness is typical of her current approach.  Although these are still images, they appear to be moving, especially the areas where ripples of water reflect the crumpled petals above.  The effect is like looking into a clear pond, where rivulets of pure water descend from glacial protrusions.  Not all of the flowers are immaculate or in pristine condition, suggesting that something potentially nasty could take place and that if we gazed like Narcissus into these deep pools, we may encounter something unpleasant and engulfing.  Smulders’ images are like visual oxymorons, capturing both the effect of movement and stillness, disorder and formality, still life and landscape in a single frame.  In Tulipomania, it seems as if she has shot flowers from a gun which have then been suspended  in mid air before they reach their target.  The impression of a high-speed ejection of a cornucopia of blossoms in this panoramic photographed is extraordinary.  These flowers have rejected their familiar celebratory or consolatory roles at weddings, birthdays and funerals and it's almost as if Smulders' blooms have become wayward and violent, acquiring a life of their own beyond our control.
There is something entrancing and almost immoral about Smulders’ work, perhaps because we are invited to abandon the competent, rational part of ourselves to imagine ourselves inside her voluptuous scenarios.  In images such as Bloody Tulips Smulders sees her work crossing a boundary beyond decency and respectability.  Recently she has begun to include small insects in her photographs and combined with drops of blood red juice on pallid blooms, they become slightly sinister.
One reason why her images may be so revered in The Netherlands is because her work continues a tradition of still life painting that reached its climax in the 17th Century.  Living in the southern half of The Netherlands, where people are considered to be less severe than their northern neighbours, Smulders’ images celebrate a visual eroticism.  400 years ago, however, images of flowers played a different role.  They were not only expensive and beautiful exquisite objects to hang in grand canal houses, but also reminders of human mortality.  Flowers symbolised an image of perfection that couldn't last and such transient moments were captured by painters such as Rachel Ruysch.  These images told the viewer that life is precarious, and virtue was to be prized.  Margriet Smulders agrees that her work acknowledges the Dutch Golden Age of painting but her photographs are not intended as Memento Mori, exhorting us to behave well.  Her images are insistently about life rather than death, and their unruly fecundity is what makes them compelling.  Smulders wants the viewer to abandon themselves in looking, and like Baudelaire she wants her work to insist that "you always have to be drunk". She says; "You can look for ages at these photographs, really wander as if in a landscape because there's always more to see, they suck you in".  
Like a new lover, these images offer the potential of something astounding about to happen, experiences that you've always longed for. Paradoxically, they also arouse desire that can never be consummated.  They almost turn the eye into an organ that could taste and gorge on these delicious images. But the eye can’t lick or chew, so we can never get enough of these velvety, purple irises, the ragged orange tulips and crumpled lips of full-blown petals.  Smulders’ potent images are full of potential for imagining ourselves into these seductive landscapes.  We could get lost; there is so much to see.  They must be seen in the flesh, however, to know how beguiling they really are.  But beware; they are perilous because looking at images so beautiful makes it hard to walk away. How can we part from these gorgeous things, abandoning them to their succulent excesses?

Siobhan Wall