TMH opens its 2022/23 season with a new program dedicated to photography and LEO VROEGINDEWEIJ’s Ephemeral Projects. Vroegindeweij’s breathtaking installation for our 18th-century stijlkamer places the viewer at the heart of the show. We find ourselves mirrored in the high-gloss spheres he has strewn across the floor, with art reflecting life (reflecting us) reflecting art. The parallel group show finds insightful echoes in the photographic prints, sculptures, paintings, and installations of SYLVIE BONNOT, ANDRÉ DE JONG, and ZHU HONG. The theme of the ephemeral runs through each work, allowing the artists to explore new possibilities in photography.

Vroegindeweij’s installation for TMH is a follow-up to his Oeuvres éphémères in historical locations in France. 27 ready-made silver spheres (38 cm in diameter, each) are rolled across the floor under the 300-year-old Baroque ceiling. There is no title and the walls are bare without becoming a backdrop. Taking on the role of a pointed lens, each ball reflects the image of the celling’s brazen Flora and, on close inspection, of ourselves gazing in. “My work does not communicate meaning, but conveys behavior. This behavior is experienced in the encounter between the viewer and the work, in their equal but disparate roles.” This concept has run through Vroegindeweij’s work from his early pieces, which won him the 1985 Prix de Rome. Over a 45-year sculptural practice, his natural tools came to include uncontrolled circumstances, time, and space—with the TMH proposal taking shape in February 2022, right at the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

TMH’s group show explores the ephemeral with a selection of unconventional photography-inspired works. Leo Vroegindeweij contributes an exquisite photo-scan of Rodin’s sculpted hands, reimagining them as a flame-like trace captured on aluminum. Zhu Hong’s wall mural Amstel—literally ephemeral as it is temporary—finds analogies between the unframed, wall-roughened brushstrokes and her photo-documentation of light on water. André de Jong’s flowers (printed with lyrical precision on varied papers) and Sylvie Bonnot’s space phenomena (reworked in her “mue” technique) point to the uncanny, strange, and transgressive. Forming a joint presentation in the gallery’s historical space, the group show and Vroegindeweij’s intervention give an irreverent reading to its symbolism and sense of permanence.

Image announcement: Sylvie Bonnot