Luhring Augustine is pleased to present Nummer zestien, the present moment, a new work by the Dutch artist Guido van der Werve. This will mark the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery and the work’s debut.
Nummer zestien, the present moment is a three-channel video installation exploring the different states of mind that compose our consciousness, and that we all employ every day to navigate the outer world. The work is shot against a stark black background in a purely psychological space, featuring three separate groups of individuals, all of whom populate the workings of the artist’s interior mind. As the individuals perform essential and mindfulness tasks, human emotions are put on display and reduced to sheer mechanics, an aspect further explored through the mechanics of the camera and musical composition. The three videos investigate the three levels of consciousness: id, ego, and superego.
The film is strictly structured on several axes of time: days, months, years. There are twelve acts, corresponding to the twelve months of the year. The camera motions (synchronized through all three screens) during each act follow the schematic line drawings of the twelve zodiacal constellations presented at the beginning of each act. The existential mood of the work is made more tender by the musical score written by Guido, a paean written in twelve parts in the twelve major keys; a recording of Guido playing emanates from a player piano in the center of the gallery, a surrogate for the artist in this first film in which he does not physically appear.
Van der Werve was born in Papendrecht, the Netherlands in 1977. Previous solo exhibitions of his work have been presented at The Model, Sligo, Ireland; Hayward Gallery, London; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; De Hallen, Haarlem, the Netherlands; and Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland. He was the recipient of the 2012 Charlotte Kohler Prize for Visual Art as well as Le Prix International d’Art Contemporain, Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco in 2011. Van der Werve is also a classically trained concert pianist and composer, as well as an avid triathlete.
