Friday June 18 A new exhibition by Lennard Schuurmans 'Things are gonna change, i can feel it' Lennard Schuurmans has been working as an illustrator and painter for a long time. Though he only started using his birth name around three years ago. Before that he went under monikers as Frühstück, Via Via, and worked in the collective The Blouses. Changing styles and elements of his work nearly completely with every new name, his work and style remains recognizable troughout the years. Every new work he makes can be considered as an echo of his previous work, always attempting new directions and concepts. For his new exhibition “Things are going to change, I can feel it” Lennard started working with a new series of installations that help him cope with the visually aggressive chaos of modern life. Lately you've been involved in a couple of quite big commercial projects, amongst others with Nike. How do you make this fit with your free work? Does it come easy to you, or does it stay a challenge to keep the right balance? At the moment I have a love/hate relationship with illustration. I love to draw but more and more I feel limited by the commercial world. It's getting difficult to find illustration jobs that give me enough freedom to exhilarate and the space to experiment. Clients nowadays are getting more demanding because they are afraid to take risks, but taking risk is something I like to do in my work. One of the projects I did for Nike was making a letter design for the official Dutch football team shirt. The nice thing about this job was that they actually gave me a lot of freedom. They asked me to do something with letters but I could do it the way I liked it. To be able to make a letter design like that was great. For the next two years the players of the Dutch Football Team will see my design when they put on their T-shirts (it's printed on the inside of the shirt next to their hearts). This shirt is gonna be part of Dutch football history and now I'm a small part of that too. Working for a company like Nike can be nice because a much bigger audience will see your work but at the moment they don't publish my name anywhere and that's no so fly. They promised to promote the involved artists but they don't. It's frustrating to notice that such a powerful company isn't involved with, or giving credits to, the artist they work with. In your free work you've been working on a new series evolving around the chaos of modern life. How did this come about? Every day I wake up in a world that is visually aggressive. I try to cope with that by selecting the input I consider worthy enough to stay in my mind. But the things that matter to me are changing in time. My friends, colleagues, and the media I follow all give me new input everyday. This inspired me to create changing modular installations in which I invite the viewer to interact. With this work I'm not trying to capture a moment in life. I'm trying to be part of it. Did you work on these installations yourself, or did you work together with other people? This is the second time I work with these installations. The first time I made three installations as a work in progress. It generated a lot of ideas. I talked about it with Pieter Numan. He helped to work out my conceptual ideas about it. It's still a growing process and I'm planning to keep on working in this direction. It feels like a natural way to express myself. I always struggled with the traditional way of making a canvas because it's so static. With these installations I feel i can go on for ever. I have so many ideas. It really grows on me. My dad helped me out with the production process and that also feels great. You've also told me that you've been looking for more depth in your work lately, also from a art historic perspective. Where does this interest come from? I was never really interested in abstract art. But because of this new work I'm working on I started to look more into that direction and found out that my new work resonates with some of the work of artists like Paul Klee, Ellsworth Kelly, Joan Miro and Stuart Davis. My paintings are a lot more abstract than my drawings. I wanted to find out what I like so much about painting abstract forms and shapes. Especially the work of Paul Klee and some of Joan Miro's wall paintings trigger things in me that I also would love to communicate with my work. Have you found any new insights into your own work, while doing this research? I can see parallels now with my work and Post-Painterly Abstraction. Can I say that again? Post Painterly Abstraction. Damn I feel sexy now. In my new work I am interested in the relationship between positive and negative elements in a composition of abstract forms and lines. With colour and contrast I'm trying to evoke emotions and portraying moods or social networks with pure form. I'm far away from the more radical tendencies in contemporary art. I used to favor openness or clarity in my work but I notice a growing desire to incorporate dense painterly surfaces. I'm interested in rearranging elements so they can be viewed differently in a new context. Changing perspectives like patterns in live. Some times you don't fit in your surrounding or your nearly invisible at the wrong spot. But after you made some moves your shining like the Toppers in the Arena. I'm trying to create the perfect spot at the right time. Positive and negative spaces interact and by doing so create new possibilities for elements to grow, destroy, to shine, vibrate or harmonize. Finding chemistry between different elements. making rhythms, create conflicts, imitate and be part of life. Your work is always changing, almost as a chameleon around your mood, vibe and spirit. What do you think is the most essential part in your work that always stays the same? That's a difficult question. I try to find balance. I'm a builder. I build compositions, moods, characters, landscapes. I try to make elements flow, float, grow and change. But I'm also very much interested in breaking things apart and giving it a new meaning by putting it in a different context. More information on Lennard Schuurmans; www.lennardschuurmans.com Official opening: Friday 18th of June YOUR:OWN Gallery Oude Waal 35 18:00/20.30 (on view untill June 30)

Agenda: 26/03: Gijs Kast (NL) 09/04: The Things We Are (NL) 23/04: Lasse Netterstrom (DK) 06/05: Ed Templeton (USA) 21/05: Panik (UK) 04/06: Stefan Glerum (NL) 18/06: Lennard Schuurmans (NL) 02/07: Lil' Shy (FR) 16/07: Joe Holbrook (UK)            (closing exhibition) Contact: YOUR:OWN Oude Waal 35 1011 CC Amsterdam info@your-own.nl Opening times: Monday - friday 10.00 -18.00