Lot Essay
An early relief by Jan Schoonhoven, R62-19 is an intimate papier-mâché composition of sixteen quadrants. The individual depth of each square allows light to fall within the work, creating an additional four quadrants made of light and shadow. The title indicates its form in the letter ‘R’ for ‘relief’, the year it was made in ‘62’, and its number in the series of that year in ‘19’.
Schoonhoven, a civil servant for the Postal Service in Delft from 1946 to 1979, acquired artistic fame as one of the founders of the Dutch Nul Group, eventually garnering a reputation as one of the most important Dutch artists of the later 20th Century. The Nul Movement, like its German counterpart the ZERO Movement, sought to distance the artwork from subjective expression, focusing instead on the properties of the material object itself. Each artist within the group developed his own way of approaching this goal. For Schoonhoven, serial abstraction, monochrome, and the grid became the three anchors of his entire artistic oeuvre.
In some of his very first reliefs of the mid 1950s, Schoonhoven incorporated much more of his own artistic hand and laid bare the materials he used for the viewer to see plainly. While the current work’s natural appearance recalls this period in part, it is a significant deviation from this earlier process, due to its smoother surfaces, symmetry, and consistency in grid-form. R62-19 simultaneously anticipates Schoonhoven’s reliefs of the 1970s, which rely on still smoother surfaces and tighter, complex grid structures to allow the work to interact with light and shadow in a different manner.
The depth of this work gives it particular prominence when compared with other larger works in the artist’s oeuvre. Because of this single quality, this small-scale piece interacts closely with its environs, enabling light and shadow to add and remove its own grids within the relief. R62-19 is an enticing articulation of Schoonhoven’s own Dutch Nul principles and his pursuit of aesthetic sublimation.
Schoonhoven, a civil servant for the Postal Service in Delft from 1946 to 1979, acquired artistic fame as one of the founders of the Dutch Nul Group, eventually garnering a reputation as one of the most important Dutch artists of the later 20th Century. The Nul Movement, like its German counterpart the ZERO Movement, sought to distance the artwork from subjective expression, focusing instead on the properties of the material object itself. Each artist within the group developed his own way of approaching this goal. For Schoonhoven, serial abstraction, monochrome, and the grid became the three anchors of his entire artistic oeuvre.
In some of his very first reliefs of the mid 1950s, Schoonhoven incorporated much more of his own artistic hand and laid bare the materials he used for the viewer to see plainly. While the current work’s natural appearance recalls this period in part, it is a significant deviation from this earlier process, due to its smoother surfaces, symmetry, and consistency in grid-form. R62-19 simultaneously anticipates Schoonhoven’s reliefs of the 1970s, which rely on still smoother surfaces and tighter, complex grid structures to allow the work to interact with light and shadow in a different manner.
The depth of this work gives it particular prominence when compared with other larger works in the artist’s oeuvre. Because of this single quality, this small-scale piece interacts closely with its environs, enabling light and shadow to add and remove its own grids within the relief. R62-19 is an enticing articulation of Schoonhoven’s own Dutch Nul principles and his pursuit of aesthetic sublimation.