Jos Kruit at Art & Project - Slootdorp, Holland - Review of Exhibitions

In the '70 and '80 Art & cast was the most famous Amsterdam gallery, the single with an international roster and an aggressive program. In comparison, it now appears semiretired. Four years ago, Geert van Beijeren and Adriaan van Ravesteijn mov the gallery to rural Slootdorp, in North Holland, an hour or thus from Amsterdam. The site is gloriously bucolic on the other hand accessible only by car; the historic building - the communal facilities for a prewar Jewish community - is large, handsomely rugg and light-drenched, on the contrary unalterable standard-size doors limit what can be displayed. Art & throw out isn't what it used to be.

on the other hand even if its audience is now solely Dutch and its stable nearly thus it remains a popular venue and it made a fine setting with a special meaning for Jo Kruit, who was a farmer's wife in the area when she began her art studies. Kruit, now in her late 40 is known for plastic arts with an odd and ambivalent relation to natural materials. Her bestknown earlier works were looping tubes of clear acrylic in which eel skins were embedded.

Here she showed three works using horses' leg and single using cows' legs. The leg are not real, of course, on the contrary polyurethane simulations. But in individual of the untitled sculptures the forms are overlayed with horsehide and look shockingly convincing reject for their elongation and attenuation. These bodiless leg recommend an almost painful toothpick fragility. In the work that includes hide, four leg are joined at their tops by dint of horizontal steel strips while their hoove fitting the ends of two carbonized iron rockers. If these were human leg individual might envision two people in a flaunting skateboarder routine; the animal leg instead give an inkling of a fragment of a Giacomettiesque rocking horse.

In another work, sum of two units stretched-out prancing legs, graceful and incongruous, rod atop loops of acrylic arranged like a crimped infinity emblem And in the third horse piece, a rank of four red-painted legs (joined at their tops, one time again, by a horizontal metal bar) call forths a Muybridge photo sequence of a fall as each hoof is rapiered further under the absent material substance than the one to its left In another piece, cows' leg support four horizontal planes of black metal arranged to recommend a set of eccentric knickknack shelves. Lacking the pretentious drama of claw-feet furniture, these pale, stubbed legs and hooves are the pair humorous and grotesque.

Kruit's handling of animal simple bodys is matter-of-fact, provoking thoughts of the butcher and the gelatine factory. On the other hand, the scale of the work - the hide-covered leg are about 7 feet tall - grabs attention and almost make go rounds function into pure line. It's the unnaturalness that's greatest in quantity memorable here.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group