Foundation Art and Public Space
artist: Ger van Elk
located in: Kennemer Gasthuis,
client: Kennemer Gasthuis
In all his art, including this work, Ger van Elk (1941, living and working in Amsterdam) pleads for contemplation, concentration, intimacy and tranquility. The Gezicht op Haarlem (A View of Haarlem) is the latest in an extensive series of landscapes in which Van Elk sheds new light on the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Century landscape paintings.
Ger van Elk
A View of Haarlem
photo: Pieter Boersma
Van Elk positions the horizon exactly halfway on the height of the painting. The horizon, which is in reality elusive and shifts with each movement of the observer, is in Van Elk’s painting, composed of a horizontal surface along which the two flat halves of the painting are inverted with respect to each other. One half is the earth’s surface, in this case a bare stubble field in the bulb-growing region and one half is the sky. Beneath the sky one makes out the silhouette of a few buildings with, in the middle, Haarlem’s Grote Kerk (church). This work is simultaneously a painting and a sculpture, realistic and picturesque, photographed, painted, photographed again, digitally processed, printed on film and cased in Perspex; transparent yet opaque.
