| Rudolf Boelee |
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Born in the Netherlands in 1940 Rudolf Boelee is an artist, resident in New Zealand for forty years, who fuses his European roots with those of the new country from the perspective of the immigrant. He has exhibited widely within New Zealand. His paintings and one-off screenprints on painted surfaces include photographic material and are coolly modernist, smoothly designed, but may also have strong reference to the history of human endeavour and struggle.Recent exhibitions include 'Crown Lynn New Zealand' (High Street Project, Wellington City Art Gallery 1996), 'Postcards from Rotterdam' (Centre of Contemporary Art, Christchurch 2000), and 'Her Dissatisfaction_' (at the Physics Room, Christchurch 2003 The bombing of Rotterdam, hometown of Boelee's family, began when Rudolf was just ten days old. His whole early childhood was experienced under Nazi occupation and he lived his boyhood through the slow and painful period of reconstruction. Rudolf Boelee's father was a socialist atheist, having been a member of the AJC (Young Socialist Movement) in the twenties and thirties, and while his mother shared her husbands politics she retained her Lutheran faith. Before the Nazi invasion they both held a utopian vision of social justice which was widespread throughout Europe at that time. The idea crumpled with the brutality and corruption of the war and its aftermath. In its wake capitalistic consumerism replaced the fair distribution of wealth in the West and communist control replaced liberation of thought in the East. After a stint in the Dutch Merchant Navy and compulsory military training in the Netherlands, Boelee left Europe for New Zealand in 1963. It seemed to him that the utopian dream of his parents was still possible here. The idea had already been established by the First Labour Government. Society was reasonably egalitarian and New Zealand had not suffered the destruction or grim disillusionment of war ravaged Europe. And there was space. Boelee was particularly interested in the left wing art and literature of the 1920's to 1940's. Where in Europe these visions had disintegrated Boelee believed in the 'new' country a cohesive, culturally alive, fair society was conceivable. In Boelee's view the effect of market politics in the 1980's and the rise of a blind consumerism in our own age has left our culture hollow. In 1969 Rudolf Boelee commenced painting. His early works were figurative, contrasted modelled paint with flat areas of clear bright colour and referred to film and popular culture. As time has gone by the work has become flatter, more simply modernist with reference to the clean idealism of the Constructivists. Most of the work of the last ten years has been made without visible brushwork. Boelee prints black screenprint onto flat areas of painted colour on board. The whole surface is then laquered to a soft finish to present a look that could be machine made, placing it clearly in our own era. There have been two main themes to his work. One stems from Europe, his parents, life in Rotterdam in the 1940 and 50's and the other to the New Land, kiwiana, social history and the new context. These two strands reflect his position as an immigrant and Rudolf Boelee embraces this fundamental tension and dichotomy in his work. It has enabled him to grasp a broad range of subjects from the fully figurative to the nearly abstract and to tie the two parts of his life together. From an early age the artist has been hugely affected by film and this interest has pervaded all his work. Some images seem like stills from documentary footage, the grainy black and white appearance of the silkscreen enhances this affect, and we sense the eye of the cameraman, slightly detached but visually acute. Not all of Boelee's work is political. In formal terms the works are elegant, 'modern'. They have a quiet dignity, persuasively claiming the surrounding space. Brought up in densely populat |
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Rudolf Boelee work featured on this site:
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