Wilfried Lentz Rotterdam

The title A Flower Garden of All Kinds of Loveliness Without Sorrow is borrowed from the encyclopaedic text “Een bloemhof van allerley lieflijkheyd sonder verdriet”(1668) by Dutch philosopher Adriaan Koerbagh, a companion of Spinoza and his circle. Due to his controversial writing, which intervened against the cultural injustice resulting from the distortion of religious and clerical meanings, he lived in exile and died in prison in Amsterdam.
The exhibition alludes to a garden, or rather, a public park. It contains sculptures described as ‘hosting structures’, which look like functional public furniture, ingeniously composed from slotting mechanisms in multicolored composite plates, through a material process that is a metaphor for collectivity. The hosting structures are hybrids, objects in between design and art, and they can also be seen as philosophical seeds. The artist has dedicated them to historical and modern figures who were unjustly persecuted for their beliefs, ideas or behaviors. The hosting structures further accommodate a growing repository of wooden bustes produced cooperatively by staff and students of Nyundo Art School in Rwanda, in a context of their study of monuments, testimony and witnessing. This exhibition at Wilfried Lentz is inscribed in a wider iterative program of exhibitions, screenings and lyrical performances by the same name, in Amsterdam, Kigali, London and New York.

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