Impure Psychotic Printing (in the spirit of Astaroth)

Ewoud van Rijn
Impure Psychotic Printing (in the spirit of Astaroth)

Coming up at HOK is Ewoud van Rijn and his Psychotic Printing! You may know Ewoud van Rijn from his series of Maldoror Militants at the Booijmans. So just imagine that… phew! We managed to drag him out of these lofty surrealist surroundings to our humble HOK at Westeinde 61 in The Hague.

One continuous and characteristic feature in the practice of Ewoud van Rijn has been the production of Rorschach blots and similar symmetrical patterns: Van Rijn is continually returning to creating these, often at decisive moments in his artistic direction.

One such moment occurred when, after a long period of a hybrid artistic research into the overlap of contemporary art practices and spiritual practices, and taking his inspiration from Astaroth, the Great Duke of Hell himself, Van Rijn returned to the studio to focus on experimental printmaking.

Then, the amalgamation of printmaking, drawing and painting occurred which characterises Van Rijn’s practice today. Surrealist automatism, rarely used in printmaking, is the formative key to the family of works currently on display at HOK Gallery. Yet it is an automatism constrained by the formal rules, materials and tools that are defining its outcome.

Van Rijn compares these images with the ectoplasmic goo foaming from the mouth of mediums in spiritist trance seances, called forth as spectacle and creating uncanny materializations of the medium’s inner demons, ancestral as well as familial spirits and other unfathomable entities that emanate in a dynamic in which spiritual emanation and mental projection fuse.

Opening: Friday June, 9th 7 pm.
With Louis Verschoor reading from his prose works ‘Station 23’.

The exhibition will be on view till Saturday July, 8th.

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www.hokgallery.com

Opening hours:
Friday & Saturday 13-17h