BigArt (1-4 Oct) with Donald Schenkel

During Big Art 2020 we will show the newest work by Donald Schenkel, Triptych of Verticals. 

Big Art is a pop-up platform for XL art installations and huge design objects, brought to you by a blend of established artists and designers as well as upcoming talents. Every autumn Big Art occupies an iconic building in or around Amsterdam where dozens of artists and designers fill the place with a unique mix of monumental paintings, oversized drawings, large sculptures, big photos and installations.

In Triptych of Verticals Donald Schenkel (1991) connects three immense canvases painted with oil paint by means of their composition. For Donald composition means the build up of moments in which colours shift from one shade to the other. Triptych of Verticals implicates vertical columns that are linked together in fields of colour, at which the vertical movement exists as a vibration in a continuum of colours that flow from left to right.

With this triptych Donald is assimilating processes of the past one and a half years. Early in 2019 he opened all registers in order to allow varying colours into his art practice. This grew in a curiosity towards bright colours and larger sizes, and expressed itself in the Behaviour of Colours solo exhibition (Guangzhou). After the solo exhibition The White Mirror at Root Gallery (Rotterdam) - in which a rethinking of the essence of his work was centred - Donald started searching for a way to let the more diverse colour palette mature. What started with a series of complex colour transitions in early 2020, with brighter colours being connected with each other through mid range tones, now it was time to carry it out on a larger scale. Triptych of Verticals places intense, sweltering and bright colours next to calm tones, or connects them with each other through in between tones that look grey from up close but are light trajectories from a distance.

In order to get a grip on the compositions in an intuitive way, Donald imagines them as depth maps, at which darker tones step down in the depth and lighter tones come to the surface. Seen as an intersection, every composition becomes a wave, every wave knows its own character and the colors pull like ripples through a surface of oil paint.

Tickets are available via www.bigart.nu

Big Art
1 - 4 October
Hembrugterrein | Zaandam
the Netherlands