Anna van der Ploeg

Omens in hot bacon

contradiction

Words and actions; two impulses separated into two feet – you are suddenly pushed from behind. Which foot steps forward to catch you? Your left foot is tied to the chair leg.

 

David Krut Projects is pleased to present Omens in hot bacon contradiction, a new body of work by Anna van der Ploeg. The unassuming table has long been the subject of Van der Ploeg’s work; through oil paintings, sculptural woodblocks, etching editions and unique paintings on paper, this innocent object of functionality and site of bounty and beauty in art history is brought into a disquieting arena of dinner table talk and capricious human interactions. 

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CURRENTLY ON SHOW IN

New York   &   Johannesburg

A bridge built momentarily over an absence they all shared – momentarily, for the bridge was soon burnt, 2023

Oil on canvas
53.2 x 37.6 in / 135 x 95.5 cm

Available in New York (inquire for shipping cost)

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Over and over in later years when she told this story she marvelled at his ability to eviscerate coincidence, 2023

Oil on canvas
39.4 x 22.4 in / 100 x 57 cm

Available in New York (inquire for shipping cost)

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Editions

The negotiators (2021)

 

Liftground and spitbite aquatint etching with drypoint

Edition of 15

65,4 x 101,4 cm

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That hot bacon smell of pure
contradiction (2023)

 

Hardground, liftground and spitbite aquatint etching with drypoint

Edition of 18

65.4 x 101.4 cm

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Antilogic is the dance of the dog in hell happy to eat any food that grows, but do they not say the same of a dog in heaven? (2023)

 

Hardground, liftground and spitbite aquatint etching with drypoint

Edition of 18

65.4 x 101.4 cm

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Yes I heard you thinking of me did you hear me laughing (2023)

 

Hardground, liftground and spitbite aquatint etching with drypoint

Edition of 18

65.4 x 101.4 cm

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No date no wait no fate to contemplate (2023)

 

 

Liftground with drypoint, liftground, spitbite aquatint printed chine collé

Edition of 7

141,5 x 56 cm

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anna van der ploeg

Omens are for example hearing someone say victory as they pass you in the street (2023)

 

Liftground with drypoint, liftground, spitbite aquatint printed chine collé

Edition of 7

141,5 x 56 cm

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Possible night, impossible night, pegs, strings, stringing one excuse to every guest (2023)

 

Hardground, liftground, spitbite aquatint etching with drypoint and chine collé

Edition of 7

141,5 x 56 cm

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What eyes at eagle height can see back as far as a day in March (2023)

 

Hardground, liftground, spitbite aquatint etching with drypoint and chine collé

Edition of 7

56 x 141,5 cm

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I’ve relived that moment many times since then, but in the last couple of years, I’ve started to imagine it from a third point of view (2023)

 

Liftground and spitbite aquatint, with drypoint on silkscreen coloured Hosho adhered to paper

Edition of 12

32.5 x 46 cm

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Any informed spectator would have understood that scene (2023)

 

 

Spitbite aquatint and drypoint on silkscreen coloured Hosho adhered to paper

Edition of 12

32.5 x 46 cm

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Monotypes

Unique paintings transferred using a press

Available in New York

Who else do you say that to, 2023

 

 

Multi-layered oil-based monotype

39.4 x 28.3 in / 100 x 72 cm 

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The problem is that my scrutiny of the scene from every possible angle doesn’t reveal a single clue, 2023

 

Multi-layered oil-based monotype

39.4 x 28.3 in / 100 x 72 cm 

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To get them out of her she tries making a list of words she never got to say, 2023

 

Multi-layered oil-based monotype

19.3 x 14.2 in / 49 x 36 cm 

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Monotypes Available in Johannesburg

They sat in the kitchen and talked about his “mysteries“, 2023

39.4 x 28.3 in / 100 x 72 cm 

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Who is this person this chasm this lost event, 2023

19.3 x 14.2 in / 49 x 36 cm

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I never asked, 2023

 

19.3 x 14.2 in / 49 x 36 cm 

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Words are a strange docile wheat are they not, they bend to the ground
105 x 73.5 cm

Life coach behind bars
73 x 48 cm

Caterpillar love letter
100 x 72 cm

Short crisp to the point
78.5 x 53 cm

The if the minister who turned into a paper shredder could talk gate
100 x 72 cm

 

*Hand printed onto Egyptian cotton adhered to 100% cotton paper

I haven’t left out words or gestures or even those emotional interlocutions that pass between people
73 x 48 cm

The transformation of subtle indecipherable day shard encryptions into firm nut and bolt explanations gate
100 x 72 cm

The transformation of business is lousy into business is great gate
100 x 72 cm

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To purchase a drop of shiny sky
73 x 48 cm

Well
73 x 48 cm

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Kindling
73 x 48 cm

To ask would break some rule
49 x 36 cm

That night there was no piano lesson
49 x 36 cm

 

*Hand printed onto Egyptian cotton adhered to 100% cotton paper

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Fiction forms what streams in us
Oil painting on canvas
100 x 72 cm

Available in Johannesburg (inquire for shipping cost)

Detail as a reticent event
Oil painting on canvas
100 x 72 cm

Available in Johannesburg (inquire for shipping cost)

A bracket’s worth of mirage
Oil painting on cotton
94 x 60 cm

Available in Johannesburg (inquire for shipping cost)

Enter the drinkable thread of life
Oil painting on cotton
94 x 60 cm

Available in Johannesburg (inquire for shipping cost)

Anna van der Ploeg: Unusual Constraints

Kate McCrickard

June 2023

When I arrive in her studio in the attractive town of Leuven, a short train ride south of Brussels, one of the first remarks South African artist Anna van der Ploeg makes is a comment on restlessness: she needs room to roam ­– in her mind, all over the world and in her studio. Van der Ploeg has left her homeland temporarily and is, for now, happily settled in Belgium. The group of prints created with master printer Roxy Kaczmarek earlier in the year at the David Krut workshop in Johannesburg, form the basis of Omens in Hot Bacon Contradiction, her first solo show in New York. In a two-room studio ­– all industrial high windows and clear light – lodged in the handsome old factory building belonging to the M Leuven (Museum Leuven) Cas–co five-month residency, Van der Ploeg is finalising works to complete her New York show and for the exhibition required by the Museum at the end of her stay. She is working in varied media – oil painting, steam-bent ply­­­­wood sculpture and printmaking in monotype and intaglio. Poetry, musings and the written word are also intrinsic to her practice; performative, kinetic ideas and floor-based sculptures may edge in too.

 

For the contiguous exhibitions taking place at David Krut 151 Gallery, Johannesburg and David Krut Projects New York, Van der Ploeg has devised works under the loose aegis of an unknown ‘game’: her images circle around ideas of  board games, washing flapping on lines, hands holding tiny pools of space; hands holding wisps of paper set alight in twists of smoke like rising wishes; feet misaligned in the secret space under a table; a dialogue with a frog in that same safe space under the table. She gives us private views of knees seen from above and feet seen from below, setting up arenas of purported domestic calm. Van der Ploeg has an uncomfortable talent for sizing up the tacit truths played out in small human interactions.

 

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How Do We Catch Smoke With our Hands? 

Lukanyo Mbanga

June 2023

How do we catch smoke with our hands? How do we create a cocoon with our fingers to trap the transient heat? What weight do words hold if they can be turned to ashes in a single flame? Anna Van der Ploeg’s solo exhibition Omens in hot bacon contradiction is one that only leaves us with questions. The scenes are uncomfortably intimate, inviting the audience to act as witnesses whilst simultaneously expelling us to the side-lines. There is nothing more confrontational than subjective realism. That nullifying feeling of, “it makes sense, but it also doesn’t.”  I’ve tried to make sense of it and only realized that like all art, how we interact with it will always be nuanced with our own understandings of shapes, things, and experiences. 

 

Van der Ploeg’s work is strangely reminiscent of Blake and Beckett. It’s a bizarre connection and a strange mix of eras but the connection is apt, nonetheless. We see William Blake in the mystical representation of the human form, the contained earthy and intestinal colour-palate, as well as the interdependent relationship between words and image. A Beckettian air emerges in the reduction of the body, as well as the absurd and interrogative question that calls us to “imagine” as we gaze at a woman laying languidly beneath a table seemingly conversing with a frog (See Yes, I heard you thinking of me did you hear me laughing). Through this, we see how The Romanticist and Modernist converge as Van der Ploeg draws on the subjective experience of human exchange with representational rather than realistic forms. It calls us to witness an ineffable realm of human interaction made solid with etched marks and brushstrokes. 

 

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Workshop Residency Blogs

The Painterly Print
anna van der ploeg
Continuing 'The negotiator' Series
New Long Format and Small Works

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New York show info@davidkrut.com

Johannesburg show info-jhb@davidkrut.com

Van der Ploeg first created etchings at the David Krut Workshop in early 2021, and she continues to weave a narrative about reciprocity and its intricacies, and hidden messages concealed in the smoke and the breeze. Omens in hot bacon contradiction includes new etching editions and unique paintings on paper made in collaboration with Printer Roxy Kaczmarek. The artist is an accomplished printmaker herself, having studied printmaking and awarded residencies in France, India, and Japan, where she worked with Mokuhanga, a water-based woodblock printmaking technique. This ancient technique lends itself to building up many layers of colour – creating depth while maintaining subtlety. A sense of moodiness emerges from the prints as they probe notions of performativity, concealment, and tenderness in social interactions, not only in the subject but in the layering of different techniques, such as tonal aquatint layers integrated with subtle, suggestive drypoint marks.

 

Traditionally, tableaux present a scene for a distant observer. Van der Ploeg’s works, while staging and positioning participants in a rehearsed scene, subvert the tableaux with angles that position the viewer dizzyingly within it. The images depict a constant tension, a push and pull, between individuals who simultaneously reveal and conceal in the dance of conversation and the uncertainty of a new social group. While a space for closeness, exploration, and unveiling narratives, it is also a space for ‘preserving strangeness’, maintaining a façade, and keeping with prescribed behaviours.

 

Instruments illustrate the precarity of these relations and interactions, notably the community poster, which introduces an avenue for strangers to find a common sentimentality that may or may not become actualised in our increasingly individualistic society. Another trope is that of the social game, an activity which allows for connection while including rules and prescribed manners of engagement. Knots of limbs and hands encircling a circular pool are featured in Van der Ploeg’s monotypes, or unique paintings on paper; this representation of a futile game of holding water within one another’s hands for as long as possible creates radial visuals surrounding what could be deep, portal-like spaces. The titles of other works refer to ‘gates’, as if into adjacent realities.

 

With imagery that evokes smoke signals or white flags of surrender, van der Ploeg’s work delves into scenes of domesticity with a polaric, touching, obscurity.

I use the word ‘game’, but the artist clarifies: “Game can feel like too strong a word. Here it is being used to describe a set of prompts – words on slips of paper introduced at a table of people to disrupt interactions that already follow some sort of pattern, prescribed by the object they gather around. ‘Game’ is useful as a descriptor insofar as it asks for participation and a type of openness to move within an artificial framework. This game doesn’t have a name yet. It is itself a work in progress. It is very open, made by minds that hate board games, but like the creativity and curiosity that is formed by unusual constraints.”[1]

 

So much in that last phrase can be applied to printmaking.

 

In her paintings, there is no constraint and Van der Ploeg applies her oils swiftly onto drum-tight linen sized with South African bovine-based hide glue, or buttercup yellow, dyed cotton. Her all-pervasive honey-coloured ground appears as some kind of homage to the sacred bee (In 2011, she emerged miraculously unscathed from an encounter with a swarm of bees while all her companions were savagely stung); it works harmoniously with a reduced palette of olive greens, aubergines, siennas and blacks worked on top. The painting, A bridge built momentarily over an absence they all shared – momentarily, for the bridge was soon burnt presents two hands rendered in a blood-tone sienna that torque the composition upwards into black smoke that rises from the central burning twist of paper, backlit by wedges of light. The hands meet and almost slip into abstraction, like things half-seen out of the corner of your eye, directing our attention to the act of playing and questioning what exactly is hanging in the balance here? The quick painted mark also lends itself well to watercolour monotype (In 2017, Van der Ploeg travelled to Japan to study the traditional woodblock printing technique of Mokuhanga[2]) and the numerous examples on display here hover between abstraction and description.

Gesture is central and in printmaking, even though corralled to an extent by “unusual constraints”, Van der Ploeg seems to thrive on every technical challenge thrown at her by Kaczmarek. Their collaboration demonstrates a fascination with illusion, transparency and the syntax of the printed image in all its poetic and historical complexity: intaglio works in the show incorporate spitbite, liftground, aquatint, hardground, drypoint and screenprint in fine displays of technique. Still Point of a Turning World reveals the chemical experimentation of printmaking in its margins, showing test marks for biting times and depth of tone dotted around the image outside the plate edge, like doodles. As the artist puts it: “It was a space outside the frame that tracks the technical taxonomy of the work. I was testing tools, timings and pressures in the background, while also working on the actual drawing. The same way you test your food as you cook, it doesn’t make sense to have a separate dish [to] taste from. Having it in the print meant that it’s all going on in one pot.”[3] There is a similar playfulness to be found in the margins of prints by Edvard Munch and Félix Buhot. 

  

Though not on display in NYC, Van der Ploeg’s steam-bent plywood sculpture should be considered next to her works on paper and canvas. Deep Pocket (acrylic on carved plywood, steam bent, 200 x 123cm, 2022) comprises a large vertical plywood cut-out that unfurls outwards from the wall on its lower, fringed edge, as if in movement not unlike the sheets of flapping washing seen in her prints. But the humble reference, here made monumental, is to the homemade community poster found pinned to lampposts or on supermarket announcement boards. After painting the wood in diluted watercolour causing distortion, Van der Ploeg begins to chisel and gouge, seeing where the marks will take her – going back and forth from painting to carving, sanding and buffing the relief points – islands within the gouging that suggest floating words or thoughts: the word as image; writing as something you can see rather than read. She describes the process as “painting, but of a very sculptural kind”. The resulting surfaces show a density of marks with signification uncertain – not so much expressive turbulence as painted, sculpted turbulence. 

 

After painting, Van der Ploeg steam bends the painted wood with a DIY technique suited to her peripatetic lifestyle. It involves a small steam chamber made out of plastic bags with a boiling kettle placed underneath, quite inimical to the sophisticated results – “an imprecise science,” she calls it. She uses her strong, bare hands like vices to hold the wood above the steam and manipulate it into its new form until it sets and cools.  

Even in light conversation, Van der Ploeg chooses her words carefully, understanding their power. Words and titles prompt her images, but is the relationship contiguous, tangential, or deliberate diversion? Supposedly the best visual art we have is as conceptually strong as it is visually thrilling. And in good conceptualism, the title of a work usually retains a coherent and tautological semantic relationship to the pictorial structure of the piece and the materials with which it is made. What to make, then, of a monotype that presents six arms reaching over what is perhaps a board game or into a tiny pool of water, titled as follows:  

 

Do you see it as a room or a sponge or a careless sleeve wiping out half the blackboard by mistake or a burgundy mark stamped on the bottles of our minds what is the nature of the dance called Memory 

 

Other examples: Possible Night, impossible night, pegs, strings, stringing one excuse to every guest and Antilogic is the dance of the dog in hell happy to eat any food that grows, but do they not say the same of a dog in heaven? The latter is the title of a landscape-format intaglio print showing the same dog, repeated, rushing out of the picture plane through time and space. Some images are given paragraph-long titles; grammar is avoided. 

 

The late Art historian Michael Baxandall conceded a dialectical opposition of word and image, concluding that language is not made for pictures. I believe this to be true, but I am not sure that Van der Ploeg is making words for pictures. Are her words part of the overall ‘game’ – prosopopeia – meaning figures of speech in which an abstract thing is personified, in which an imagined or absent person (herself or the art work?) is represented as speaking? Some artists leave their work accompanied by no words at all. Hers throw up many questions: can they be considered as expressionist as her marks? How would her images exist if they were word-free? Do we turn from the language to the art or the art to the language? 

She offers an explanation on the choice of the word ‘omen’ in her show title : 

 

I am interested in omens and the way things precipitate others. Of the many types of intelligence, I think there’s symbolic intelligence too, and that can develop more rapidly at some moments than other intelligences. So omens; the ominous. And then two seemingly contradictory modes being present, symbiotic, co-reliant, in silent solidarity – this is something I feel finely tuned to as a worthy target for my curiosity because they will always  evade simple comprehension, and it’s much more fun to work with things you don’t understand ?… Except that this body of work felt more intense. The game flung up something unexpected and furious, the spitting sizzle you can smell from down the street. It’s as simple as that sometimes: the title needed some salty, pungent seasoning. More fire. I’m a vegetarian.  

 

Van der Ploeg’s tableaux are personal and also obscure (Consider the choice of the honey ground and the story of the bees – though it works well formally, her choice is idiosyncratic.) She draws mystery and disquiet from rehearsed domestic scenes, the trope of the social game or drab activities; an observed tension comes through in her emotive titles and a resistance to prescribed societal rules of engagement. The works takes on a diaristic slant when she explains her imagery as, ‘more like a second-hand account from an event’; she anthropomorphasizes her wooden sculptures as ‘thirsty’ when in need of varnish. Printmaking may offer her, to recontextualize Braque, “a rule to curb the emotion” providing the joinery in her broader overall design4. The dichotomy between effortless, uninhibited paint application, the physical labour required to bend rigid wood and gouge with sharp chisels; the curveballs thrown at us through her texts, may just be the heart of the matter.  

 

Anna van der Ploeg (born 1992) graduated in 2022 from KASK Royal Academy School of Arts, Belgium with a high distinction in Masters of Fine Arts. She obtained her Bachelor in Fine Arts from the University of Cape Town in 2015. Her works are held in the collections of the V&A Museum and the South African National Bank. In 2023, Van der Ploeg was artist in residence at the David Krut Workshop, Johannesburg.

A Dance of Words and Image 

 

Similarly, to Blake and Beckett, words in Van der Ploeg’s work are almost as consequential as the art. The title of the exhibition immediately draws us into the absurd and incites us to try find connections in the odd and disjointed.  In the production of Not I in 1974, Beckett insisted that the lights be removed in the foyer, the bathrooms, and the theatre, so attention can be focused solely on the enlarged mouth on the screen. The audience is forcefully subsumed in a stream of words with only a moving mouth as visual support. Similarly, in Omens are for example hearing someone say victory as they pass you in the street, the audience gazes at a disembodied hand that is at the same time a body in itself, as it crouches awkwardly away from the bright flame. The title purports a message that seems to have no apparent connection with the image but forces you to stay in its wake until you can make that connection. Anything. The nature of our brain to compartmentalize says: stay and think. Perhaps you’ve got it. You think to yourself there must be significance in the fact that this is the only work where the word ‘omens’ has a direct reference. A term that Van der Ploeg is particularly absorbed by, describing it as having “symbolic intelligence”. The hand in the etching carries a bursting flame at the tip of its fingers as though just a breath of a touch can ignite a glaring rupture. In this, I see a calm calling to not overlook the interconnectedness of commodities and rather be open to what they are telling us. And like omens, they tell each of us something different. They are deeply personal and tailored to our own experiences. Like the image, the notion of omens call us to decode the domino effects that exist secretly in the happenings of life. Similarly, to Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, I see this exhibition as walking into an optic anthology where words dance with images. Where words are victims of flames and are undermined by human interaction (see The Negotiators and That hot bacon smell of pure contradiction). The titles give those disintegrating notes/letters/whatever they are a chance, a rebirth, or a second run in capturing the ephemeral.  

“The Table as an Enzyme” 

 

In Van der Ploeg’s masters thesis, titled: Slab for Inscription or Game she dissects the pervasive and yet undermined presence of the table. When reading this brilliant and quirky homage, you begin to realize that life is in fact centred around the table. We eat at the table, leave the table, work at the table, exchange words of love or words of hate at the table. Minds that shape the world convene around tables, contracts that either make or break relationships are signed at the table. The table hides and reveals, it gathers and disperses, it marks intimacy or sets distance. This object acts as a prop or a centrepiece but essentially, its function is to hold, to support, to carry.  

 

In Van der Ploeg’s work she visually interrogates this phenomenon by asking her audience, what message is this table carrying, or what message is it hiding? In Who invited this guy? the table lurks in the background as havoc unfolds in the foreground. The dynamic chaos is amplified further by the stark white tablecloth, a symbol of undressing, of table-manners subverted. In this image the table no longer serves as a support structure to contain the tension. There is now freedom of movement, and chaos reigns free. Herein lies the table working as an ‘enzyme,’ as Van der Ploeg illustrates in her thesis. A table serves as the hidden catalyst for events, revelations, awkward exposures such as who shouldn’t be at the party…like whoever ‘this guy’ was.  

'Who invited this guy?' (2021)

Finding Meaning in the Paradoxical 

 

To continue the thread of the modernist influence, undeniable elements of surrealism and expressionism emerge from Van der Ploeg’s work. In That hot bacon smell of pure contradiction, smoke suffuses the image as it rises from burning bits of paper, evoking a private world that’s disintegrating beneath the surface. The hard, etched lines of the smoke tell their own story of a turmoil contained in the soft tints and strokes of awkwardly folded legs. Here, a loud epic emerges from a mundane story. In her review of Van der Ploeg’s work Unusual Constraints, Kate McCrickard draws a connection between Van der Ploeg’s prints and that of Edvard Munch. Art historian, Josef Paul Hodin’s writes how Munch was on a walk when he looked across the bank and saw the bleeding red sky and thought to himself that ‘nature was screaming.’ This thought was then translated into his emblematic painting, “The Scream”. Similarly Van der Ploeg adopts the same principles of a subjective reality and how it can be depicted and received by each individual. The paradox of image and the surrealist element of mismatched objects implores its viewers to interrogate the hidden tensions within domestic life. Conversely, it could simply serve to leave us suspended in the frustrating void of meaninglessness. Sometimes its harder to accept that things just are because they are. As if the more you look the more their intricacies will remain hidden (if those intricacies even exist). 

 

 

x

 

 

So again, how do we catch smoke with our hands? How do we create a cocoon with our fingers to trap the transient heat? What weight do words hold if they can be turned to ashes in a single flame? Omens in hot bacon contradiction evokes all these questions of how to preserve what so easily evades us. It casts a lens onto life’s mundanities and forces us wake up our imagination and build our own narratives around the subjects.  The whimsical captures made with fine lines and brush strokes nudge the inner child in us to make absurd connections. What happens then? Well, now the table comes alive as we give it more meaning, heat and smoke are given a few moments to dance before we blow or brush it away, and all these little moments we take for granted linger just a little bit longer—as we capture the transient and let it go again.   

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