Willem Harbers

Willem Harbers portret 2ARTZUID-2023

Name: Willem Harbers
Born: The Netherlands, 1967
ARTZUID edition(s): ARTZUID 2023

About Willem Harbers

Willem Harbers studied at the Willem de Kooning academy in Rotterdam and the Gerrit Rietveld academy in Amsterdam.

Willem Harbers’ enigmatic installations stand at the intersection of art, mechanical engineering, science and nature. In his oeuvre he uses natural stone, machine parts and industrial materials. Initially he mainly worked in ceramics, but during his studies in Carrara in Italy he concentrated instead on traditional sculpting in marble. The use of natural stones such as onyx, granite and marble still play a prominent role in his oeuvre. It evokes the traditional craft of the sculptor and the art-historical traditions of antiquity and the Renaissance. This is in stark contrast to the industrial materials Harbers uses to shape his futuristic outdoor installations.

At ARTZUID Harbers presents Girosplode, a bright red and green coloured work. The installation consists of pipes and stopcocks recycled from an old water pipe. This time not found in a cellar but presented as an autonomous work of art in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp. As an artist, Harbers has a purely visual purpose in mind, without practical functionality. With Girosplode, Harbers asks important questions about the meaning of nature in the age of man. Like a plant, the sculpture seems to grow organically out of the ground. Juxtapositionally, the work also shows great similarities with a stationary machine. As a spectator it raises the question of whether we are looking at a living growing organism, at a lifeless machine object or perhaps at an organically growing machine from a future world. Harbers does not answer these questions but instead raises new ones with his sculpture.

Artworks at ARTZUID

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