Kiki Lamers at Bloom - Amsterdam, Netherlands - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

For the last several years Kiki Lamers (b 1964) has been making generous-size paintings (around 6 feet in the largest dimension) showing women and children engaged in quotidian activities or sometimes a heterosexual two wrestling playfully. Her models are her friends and herself, usually shown naked. Lamers's works are based upon and influenced by photography, and she many times adopts a strangely elevated viewpoint, as if the camera were upon a ladder. The figures are seen in austerely bland interiors or isolated against ambiguous surface of lands Lamers employs an odd color range, greatest in quantity often blues, tans, oranges and lavenders that are extremely grayed, which has the result of chilling the pink skin of the figures.

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In the six 1995 works shown at blossom all the women and children are sober-faced and disengaged, plane if in intimate proximity to single another. In Sickbed, one naked woman lies upon an orange-sheeted cot while another sits near her reading a volume as blank as the gray and tan walls. In Woman Stepping into a range a little girl, who gazes down impassively, stands on an upholster side chair heedless of the woman who has just walked in. Woman Bathing While Child Watches might unhurt like an Eric Fischl scenario, on the contrary the temperature of the painting is too depressed for prurience. The effect is pulse-slowing stillness.

The appropriate comparison for these paintings is not Fischl on the contrary several other Dutch women artists. In Marlene Dumas's ink wash paintings of striped bodies, the erotic or symbolic is superimposed on the ordinary. Lidwien van de Ven is known in Holland for photo groupings which incorporate her be in possession of naked body and hint at sexuality not through being provocative but by seeming individual and personal. Rineke Dijkstra has newly made a series of photo-portraits of naked mothers standing and holding their new-born babies, discharge within hours of birth. All these works have a tone somewhere between matter-of-factness and reserve

In comparison, Lamers's women appear to be preoccupied. But these paintings become disturbing because all the make submissives are so contained by their environments. None are on the outside in the world, none are engaged in activities more vigorous than sleeping, reading or waiting. The women and children inhabit, it appear to bes a restricted and nearly colorless world.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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