Rob Voerman
b. 1966, Deventer, Netherlands
Lives and works in Arnhem / Groessen, Netherlands
Aftermath, 2014, c-print, 99,5 x 155cm / 35 x 53cm. Courtesy Upstream Gallery
Rob Voerman creates the architecture of fictive communities consisting of a mixture of utopia, destruction and beauty. His structures, models and environments represent a desire to change reality, materialized in architecture in which man tries to flee society and start a utopian and completely autonomous world. The ambition to change, deny or manipulate reality is so strong that Rob is compelled to make spaces in which people can actually work, eat, sleep and interact.
Voerman’s often highly decorated self-build structures reflect on modernist ideas in relation to our current time and our current social and political issues. He compares today with the 1920s and 30s in which modernism, Bauhaus and The Style (a Dutch movement) began, a time in which grand ideas were developed in which a new and better world could be created by using new building methods, design and art. By comparison our current time seems to be the opposite: chaos and grand ideas are fragmented into thousands of opinions and ideas. Voerman combines Romanticism with the grim qualities of terror, often resulting in a direct translation of destruction in a purely aesthetic form.
Cities of Ash
Links :
www.robvoerman.nl
