Design Commissions
In 2020, visual artist Rutger de Vries realised an intervention in Het Nieuwe Instituut's bathroom and cloakroom.
The toilet facilities on Het Nieuwe Instituut's ground floor underwent a chromatic transformation in 2020, when a rainbow paint storm colourised the space. The effect is disorientating, yet the reference couldn't be clearer: the rampant graffiti that so often overruns public toilets. In this intervention, Rutger de Vries translates street art into the traditions of abstract and conceptual art.
De Vries's own roots lie in street art. He was a graffiti artist in his teens, a hobby that inspired him to study graphic design at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. He continued his studies at the Grafische Werkplaats in Arnhem where his work became increasingly autonomous. As a fine artist, he uses the same materials, techniques and tools as he did as a street artist - markers, aerosols and fire extinguishers that he fills with bright pigment and turns into 'painters'. "I used fire extinguishers in the toilets of Het Nieuwe Instituut," he says. "The architecture of Het Nieuwe Instituut has a certain gritty industrialism. The concrete structure, and the lighting, heating and security installations are in plain sight, so I continued this theme in my intervention. I chose the colours to reflect the three pillars of Het Nieuwe Instituut: the RGB colours, used for monitors, stand for digital culture; the CMYK colours, used for printed matter, stand for design; and the primary colours for architecture. I used these nine basic colours across the various spaces."
De Vries adds: "For big spatial installations I use mechanised paint-filled sprinklers or computer-controlled printers. Graffiti is all about handwriting, and because you're working illegally in the public space, you want to remain anonymous. But insiders recognise your work from your handwriting. Working in the context of the visual arts, it's the other way around, so I turned the principle on its head, and try to eliminate any kind of signature from my work. Aerosol spray paint is a free-hand material that you use to make shapes. A machine makes geometric forms, which creates a contradiction in the use of the material." He has devised a system that is as rigid as it can be, although many of the variables remain outside his control. He cannot predict with any accuracy exactly where the paint will land and the extent to which the various hues will flow, overlap, and bleed into each other. "I try to find a balance between orchestrating the process and letting chance step in. The spatial qualities of a room also dictate the look of the final painting. The spaces at Het Nieuwe Instituut are all different in shape, which gives rise to different patterns."
Once the installation was complete, he left his mechanised 'painters' behind. "If residues of the process remain in the installation, on entering the space, the visitor is instantly aware that an action has occurred," he explains. These lingering traces are De Vries's way to underscore the performative element of his practice.
Rutger de Vries
Rutger de Vries's work is influenced by traditions of both process painting and conceptual art, from which systematic logics arise that conform to the working conditions at hand. The outsourcing of artistic gestures to formula-like methods evokes associations with artists such as Sol LeWitt, although his canonical statement "the idea becomes a machine that makes the art" is reinterpreted by De Vries and extended into self-developed tools and computer-controlled machines. By having this equipment determine the composition, form and intensity of his automated paintings and drawings, De Vries investigates the scope of his own authorship.