Selected objects
For more than half a century, the Axel Vervoordt Company’s relationship with art and antiques has been a way to share our experiences of the world. We believe the best way to full inhabit a space is by being surrounded by architecture, furniture, art, and objects that are represented by the honesty of their materials and the purity of intent in their creation.
Shozo Shimamoto, "Armor"", 1960
Shimamoto was born in 1928, in the Yahataya district of Minato Ward, Osaka, to parents who worked in the shipping industry. He enrolled in the philosophy department at Kwansei Gakuin University in 1947. Though he did not receive any formal education in art, he won an award in the All Kansai Exhibition for a painting he made around the time he entered university.
Head of a god or royal figure
This fragmentary red granite head in all likelihood depicts either a royal figure or a deity. The archaizing features of the triangular face are delicately sculpted, featuring a broad nose, prominent cheekbones and a rounded chin. The fleshy lips are pursed into a serene smile, further accentuated by the indented corners of the mouth.
Günther Uecker, "Untitled (Weißes Bild)", 1959
Uecker’s art tends towards sculpture simply because of the way it is made. Objects such as canvas, wood, tables, chairs and pianos studded with nails produce something organic, spore-like and animated in their rhythmic structuring. By being studded with nails, in principle an aggressively destructive act, the object is deprived of its utilitarian function to become a symbolically condensed object for representation. In Untitled (Weißes Bild), the energy and dynamic are discernible which distinguish Uecker’s work. The creative process is almost palpable.
Otto Piene, Untitled, 1973
Piene was one of the artists who wanted to transform the traumas of the Second World War into optimism, renewal, and prosperity. This was also one of the basic ideas of the ZERO group he co-founded in 1957 together with Heinz Mack and later with Günther Uecker. ZERO was "the incommensurable zone in which the old state turns into the new", or, as Piene said: "ZERO expresses the human yearning to create a new world in spite of apparent chaos and the seeming fruitlessness of the endeavor, to build with what Nature provides us and with human ingenuity, with universal energy and with technology."
"Creu i dos Peus (Cross and two Feet)", Antoni Tàpies, 2007
Antoni Tàpies shared a sensibility with artists affected by the Second World War and the dropping of the atomic bomb. He soon expressed an interest in rough matter - earth, dust, atoms and particles - which made him start using all kinds of materials foreign to academic artistic expression and experimenting with new techniques. The matter paintings make up a substantial part of his work.
Grindstone
Grindstones such as this one are a clear indication of this new lifestyle. Used to grind grain on a regular, and the repetitive motion of this activity resulted in a smooth surface that brings out the natural beauty of the stone used.
Anish Kapoor, "Untitled", 2002
Presence versus absence, materiality versus absence, tangibility versus immateriality, chaos versus order: Anish Kapoor's work is full of apparent contradictions and dualities. The results are "voids", or objects that are not objects, "something that actually does not exist".
Jan Schoonhoven, "R 71-24", 1971
At first, Schoonhoven practiced drawing exclusively. This changed in 1955 when Schoonhoven conceived his earliest reliefs after seeing the spatial works of Italian contemporaries Piero Manzoni and Lucio Fontana. A few years later and along with Armando, Henk Peeters, Kees van Bohemen and Jan Henderikse, Schoonhoven became a member of the 'Hollandse Informele Groep', the Dutch informal painters (1958 - 1960).
