Carel Visser: Drawings and Collages
Carel Visser is the foremost Dutch sculptor of his generation.
However, his work on paper – primarily using heavily-layered black graphite, or, conversely, brightly coloured collage – is little known. This is the first opportunity since 1982 to see Visser’s work in London, and the only exhibition here to concentrate solely on his graphic work.
Visser was born in 1928, in Papendrecht, The Netherlands and now lives and works in the countryside, near Culembourg. He studied architecture in Delft, and drawing and sculpture in The Hague. Throughout his career, his interest in diverse cultural aesthetics – pre-Columbian, Byzantine, African, Oriental – as well as the influences of various twentieth century sculptors, has been evident in both his sculpture and his graphic work.
An early devotee of Arp, Giacometti and Brancusi (whom he met in 1952), Visser began his artistic life by shaping and welding. His sheet metal works of the fifties, based on the forms of nature, were refined in the sixties into minimal, beam-like structures that were variously cut and reassembled. In the seventies these solids gave way to an elegant series of folded and rolled metal sculptures. During the past decade, Visser’s sculpture has developed into the making of large assemblages which bind automobile and industrial cast-offs with natural materials.
The production of Visser’s drawings and collages closely follows his major sculptural themes. The collages, using magazine images and packaging objects, are often wildly coloured combinations -only checked in exuberance by the symmetry of their construction. The drawings, on the other hand, are cool, carefully constructed works, layered with graphite, which produces a steel-like sheen -something between paper and metal. As with his sculpture, Visser’s graphic work relies clearly on the balance of contrast and affinity – man-made and natural, weightlessness and volume, great strength and apparent frailty.
This exhibition is organised by Clive Adams, curator of Visser’s major exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1978.