The White Mirror

Join us for the opening of the solo exhibition The White Mirror by Donald Schenkel on the 10th of October from 19:00 until 21:30 in our gallery.

The White Mirror is an exhibition as much as an act of reflection. In this solo exhibition Donald Schenkel presents an overview of the different directions his artworks take by reviewing his fascination for oil paint in connection to its materiality and further exploring the potential of glass, mirrors and perspex. All these materials share a kind of kinship, through their inherent reflectiveness and transparency. Seeing your own reflection can be as captivating as contemplating the depths of a gradient. The artworks in this exhibition allude to lucidness and darkness.

The White Mirror is a title chosen for its poetic merits, derived from today’s astrology’s interpretation of Mayan and Aztec readings of the stars. When you are a ‘white mirror’, it means you move through life by reflection. It evokes an image that is lucid, something clear. Yet the Mayan day name and glyph Etz’nab that represent the white mirror, could actually mean a flint, a knife, a skin cutting leave, a claw or a shard of obsidian at the top of a spear. Reflection can lead to clarity, but it can also cut like a knife, it is clear as glass but as sharp as its edges.

Donald Schenkel (1991) is a Rotterdam based artist who creates subtle gradients with oil paints. He seeks for smoothness in color transitions that can lead the eye into the faraway. Sometimes these colors flash purely from the canvas, at other times they are diluted into darkening twilights.