In his newest exhibition entitled “graph”, Hentie van der Merwe presents a diverse body of recent works ranging from a room installation to drawings and objects.

Hentie van der Merwe, one of the selected “New Talents” at this year’s Art Cologne, explores the theme of identity in a myriad fashion. In a 2003 premiere exhibition held in the Gabriele Rivet Gallery, he already challenged the visual capacities of visitors to his first one-man-show with a ”camouflage room”: On red-and-white plaid textile-covered walls he mounted equally plaid-patterned aquarelles in whose black-and-white or red-and-white grids plaid animal motives were “hidden”. Each of the animals depicted was borrowed from a symbol of national or economic power: the German Eagle, the American Bald Eagle, the Russian Double Eagle, the Jaguar, the Puma or the Lacoste alligator.

The “graph” exhibition will include a similar room: line drawings will be mounted on a black-and-white Vichy-patterned textile.

ßA further group of van der Merwe works explores the thematic relationship between the artist and photographs he either collected or took himself and had pinned on his studio walls for various periods of time. They are large-sized drawings to photographs out of various archives (The National Picture Archive in Namibia, Archives of Hugh McFarlane in the Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of the Witwatersrand), or newspapers. Other photographs from family archives include pictures taken by the artist’s father during his travels in South Africa and Namibia in the 1960’s.

The exhibition title refers to the recurring grid pattern within the exhibition and the diagram motif that van der Merwe uses to depict the interaction between two variables, two realities or two worlds. Equally, he refers to systems of representation and situations documented on forms. All these aspects represent elements of the current exhibition concept.

The lower gallery rooms echo variations of this grid theme with drawings displaying the relationship between newspaper texts to numbers, of grid-patterned textiles to the human body and house and home.

Hentie van der Merwe,* 1972 in Windhoek, Namibia, lives since 2000 / 2001 in Antwerp and Cologne.