The Robroy Gallery

The Robroy Gallery exhibits collections of Contemporary European Art, however, The Robroy Gallery is in a transitional state, exhibitions and content are under review. Everything should be OK by 2005!

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Unlike Elements
At first sight Arjanne van der Spek's work looks as thought it has been knocked together. It is possible to distinguish two basic techniques, both in the sculptures and in the gouaches: first the assembling of unlike elements and the second modelling over them in places. Some of the elements used remain untouched and now and again lead one to suspect what their other original function had been. Even where the hand has provided shape, the surface remains hard. The sculptures betray a rough, multiple materiality.

Asked about the significance of the material to her work, Arjanne van der Spek - constantly putting things into perspective - says that the function of the material is to serve. The choice of the material depends on whether it is suitable for a given purpose, according to the rule that the material must be the obvious one.

The central concept is the repeated search for an individual structure of any kind whatsoever which is always on its own. This is the key to the work and so forms part of the sphere of knowledge.

Arjanne herself speaks of a principal she would like to find:
"The important thing is that you should show something that is strange and yet is right. Really, you're trying to make something that you've never seen before using quite ordinary resources. You have then discovered a principal in the thing you are constructing. A strange and personal principal, simply using plaster and cement."

Foreword by Franz Kaiser,
curator Haags Gemeentemuseum.