Giacomo Guidi is glad to present the further step of Jan van der Ploeg’s project, part of his first solo show inaugurated at the gallery in November 2014.

After the production of a big mural work and the exhibition of a selection of recent canvases, the artist presents a new site-specific wallpainting, purposely designed for one of the hallways of the headquarters of Largo Cristina di Svezia.

While his first intervention pivoted around the pattern of the Grip — a ‘ready-made shape’ borrowed from the hand sockets of cardboard boxes, which Van der Ploeg started using in 1997 — the new mural directly relates to the space of the gallery. A series of large colored triangles marks the flows and rhythms of the corridor, acting as a formal and chromatic counterpoint to the dynamics that animate it. Even in this second intervention, it is essential to the artist that the pattern draws from daily and easily recognizable geometries, which can be shifted into a pictorial context without being modified. Shapes are chosen as a departure point, providing modules that Van der Ploeg reworks on an environmental scale, when facing an architectural context, or in smaller format panel paintings.

His first wallpaintings made their first appearance at the end of the Nineties on the walls of Amsterdam: conceived as shapes, faces or schematized punctuation signs, they were meant as ‘tags’. However, the tendency towards street and urban art in Van der Ploeg’s research is hybridized with a reflection on the tradition of Piet Mondrian’s Neoplasticism and Theo van Doesbur’s De Stijl. The plastic configuration, the critical conception of the functional values of art, the chromatic, rhythmic and scale modulations, are indeed the values in which Dutch artist’s practice is rooted. At the same time, some features of his work also suggest his proximity to Design Art — especially referring to the experimentations between painting, architecture, graphics and projecting — which identifies the work of artists as Jorge Pardo, Atelier van Lieshout, Tobias Rehberger and Andreas Zittel.

Jan van der Ploeg (Netherlands, 1959) lives and works in Amsterdam. He completed his studies at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam (1982-1983) and then at the Croydon College of Art in London. From 1983 to 1985 he attended the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Van der Ploeg was the winner of the Royal Award for Modern Painting in the Netherlands in 1990. He took part in many solo and group show held at The Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Dunedin, New Zealand; the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, USA; Mercedes Benz Showroom Gallery in Berlin and Monaco, Germany; Mexico Zona Maco Contemporary Art in Oaxaca, Mexico. His work is featured in many public and private collections, as the Daimler Art Collection, Berlin, Germany; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Netherlands; the Ministry of Finance in The Hague, the Netherlands; the Dutch Embassy in London, United Kingdom.