The Back Room - Charly van Rest

The oeuvre of Charly van Rest (Jakarta, 1949) comprises assemblages, photographs, collages, sculptures, and installations and is underscored by experimentation with techniques from which he develops witty and visually appealing imagery.

In the early seventies, he developed inventive photography techniques, such as ‘ionfot’, where the electric charge of soot and dust is neutralised to create an image, and ‘Uvot’, which uses UV light to bleach posters. By using photography in unconventional ways and applying existing images as material for his work, Van Rest blurs the boundaries between image and object. By questioning the status of the image in his practice, he preceded strategies made common in many artistic practices through the advent of digital media. Van Rest is a forerunner in this discourse despite working exclusively with analogue techniques. The Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen collected his work for a number of years.

The Back Room
This collaborative project examined the position occupied by both institutions – one as an established museum, the other as a contemporary art space without a collection – at local and national level. Through this collaboration, TENT and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen aimed to reveal the subjective process of inclusion in, or exclusion from, the art canon. The artists presented in The Back Room are partly collected by the museum. However, their work has not always received the attention it deserves. The Back Room, therefore, raised questions about the role and position of the artist: how does the artist build a reputation and what factors influence their success?

Paul Beckman, Arie de Groot, Esma Yiğitoğlu
The series of four solo exhibitions at TENT focused on artists who have occupied an important position in the Rotterdam art world, but are largely unknown to the present generation: Paul Beckman (1946–2000), Arie de Groot (1937–2016), Charly van Rest (1949) en Esma Yiğitoğlu (1944–2009). Their oeuvres are relevant today, because they are artists whose the strategies and use of materials resonate with the work of the younger generation of artists.

The Back Room at TENT ran concurrently with Project Rotterdam at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, which focused on a young generation of artists not yet known as institutional figures.