Foundation Art and Public Space
artist: Tom Claassen
located in: Verpleeghuis Heemhof,
client: Atlant Zorggroep
For the nursing home, Heemhof, Tom Claassen made three identical sculptures of dogs that ‘guard’ the inside of the building. However, something contradictory lurks beneath these animals. They are made of solid bronze and yet they wobble. They are of cold metal and yet beckon to be cuddled. This ambiguity derives from Claasen’s method of playing out theme against material.
Tom Claassen
Wobbly Dogs
photo: Gert Jan van Rooij
Just like in his earlier works, solid materials such as concrete, bronze and polystyrene seem to become soft and malleable. However much tangibility emanates from the work, it still doesn’t correspond to that which is being represented.
What one does see is a type of shell, as if Claasen supplied the object or animal with an extra thick layer of skin and, subsequently, drained out its insides. This leaves us with an ostensibly solid yet, at the same time, fragile peel, the volume of which appears to be variable.
This vulnerability was literally represented in the house of cards that Claassen constructed at the 1996 Biënnale in São Paolo. Enormous polystyrene cards made up the solid ‘house’. Or was it a fragile construction? Or a real house of cards after all? Claassen made a caricature out of it and something similar takes place with the wobbly dogs in Heemhof. A lighthearted allusion is made to the ‘canine’ and yet, by their aberrations, these works simultaneously permeate the essence of a frivolous and imaginative animal kingdom.
(NW)
photo: Gert Jan van Rooij
