This solo exhibition was the second edition of a special collaboration between TENT and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, who presented underexposed but iconic Rotterdam artists in a four-part solo exhibition series. Curator was Noor Mertens, curator of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.
The oeuvre of Charly van Rest (Jakarta, 1949) consists of assemblages, photographs, collages, sculptures and installations. The basis of his oeuvre lies in experimenting with technique, with which he developed a concise and visually attractive visual language.
In the early seventies he developed self-invented photographic techniques, such as the 'ionfot', in which the electrical charge of soot and dust particles was neutralised to create an image, or the 'Uvot' in which he used UV light to fade posters. By applying photography in an unconventional way and using existing images as material for his work, Van Rest blurred the boundary between image and object. The status of the image that Van Rest questions in his oeuvre has become the subject of many artistic practices with the advent of digital media. Van Rest can therefore be seen as a forerunner in this discourse; however, he worked exclusively analogue. His work was collected by Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen for a number of years.
The Back Room
This joint project investigated the position that both institutions – as an established institution and as a contemporary exhibition space without a collection – occupy at a local and national level. With this collaboration, TENT and the museum wanted to expose the subjective process of being included in the art canon or not. The artists presented in The Back Room are partly included in the museum collection, but have not always received the attention their work deserved. The Back Room also raised questions about the role and position of the artist: how do you build a reputation and which factors influence possible success?
Paul Beckman, Arie de Groot, Esma Yiğitoğlu
Four solo presentations in TENT focused on: Paul Beckman (1946 – 2000), Arie de Groot (1937-2016), Charly van Rest (1949) and Esma Yiğitoğlu (1944–2009). Their oeuvre is particularly relevant today because the strategies and materials these artists used are related to those of today's younger generation.
The Back Room in TENT ran concurrently with Project Rotterdam in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, which focused on a young generation that had not yet been 'museumised'.