Jubilating Art Fair Kunstrai shows the city and special birds, but little political art

Forty years ago, « inspired gallery owners took the initiative to create a place where artists and collectors can meet. This is how the Kunstrai was created in 1985. And now our city’s birthday, and we celebrate the anniversary. » With these words, Mayor Femke Halsema opened the 40th edition of the National Art Fair in the Parkhal of the RAI Amsterdam, which is all about the 750th birthday of Amsterdam. Two of the oldest galleries in the Netherlands and the capital are prominent, Galerie Lieve Hemel for realistic art and Galerie Mokum that focuses on expressive landscapes and sculpture. Both galleries date from the sixties.

Founder of the Kunstrai Wim van Krimpen devised to invite a host country with accompanying galleries from the start, these were recently, among others, New York, Morocco, Japan, Berlin and Denmark. Now the emphasis is on Amsterdam 750 years. That is why it is all the more striking that the more than one hundred participating galleries offer little urban or metropolitan art. Landscapes, sometimes expressionist-dynamic or impressionistic-rejected, figuratively painted birds, flower still lifes and abstract art predominate. An exception makes art trade P. de Boer who with the impressive Panorama Amsterdam (2024) of former city draftsman Arie Schippers prominent the city in sight. We see five meters Amsterdam, painted in acrylic from the Amsterdam Tower with Central Station in the foreground and behind it the city with a red glow above it. Price: 40,000 euros. The same stand shows the impressionist Italian Giovanni Boldini (1842-1931) who painted the Zuiderkerk, price 135,000 euros. This work shows the city like tourists who like to see: a pointed tower, arch bridge, which painted canal houses, red -lit clouds in loose style.

Little political art

In her speech, Mayor Halsema called on the grim eighties, with squatters’ riots and large geopolitical tensions. The latter now also control the worldview. Current, politically charged art we only find at a single gallery, and then not an Amsterdam. Galerie De Roos van Tudor from Leeuwarden shows photos of Maartje Roos in which she unites both tradition and current affairs. Large stuffed works from the series The sea free play? depict the consequences of climate change, and she also joins tradition: in the wall -filling View of Haarlem We recognize the famous cityscape from 1670-1675 by Jacob van Ruisdael, but now the surrounding lands are half under water and only seem to escape the St. Bavo church, the dome prison and the dunes on the rising sea. Exotic birds such as Kroeskoppelikaan and Flamingo walk where Van Ruisdael painted pale fields centuries ago.

Publisher and Galerie 99 Publishers also places the bird life in the middle of the attention. With the exhibition Birdland They give a generous overview of birds in the arts of the early seventeenth century to the present. At the same time, the richly illustrated book appears Birdlandexemplary compiled by graphic design agency Mart. Warmerdam. The presentation shows the almost dramatic contradiction between the love of man for the birds and the destruction of nature by the same man. At the entrance there is a sculpture from Iris Box, Excerpts of life (2019). Numerous small objects float from nature on thin, transparent threads, such as feathers, strips of bark, shells, stones, vomit balls and even pieces of glass. It seems like a swarm of starlings. Behind it, the bird exhibition unfolds with sculptures of owls from Chris Tap and Hetty Heyster next to some small, beautiful White Box Paintings Van Christiaan Kuitwaard, four intimate works with, among other things, a dead singing thrush. Great and colorful in design and at the same time intriguing are the so -called ‘exotic bird models’ of the Australian photographer and artist Leila Jeffreys who portrays the Moluccan cockatoo prudence in soft pink shades.

Raw material

The exciting of Birdland Is that countless collected works of art not only offer a sample card of ornithology, but also reflect art history: we are going from the meticulous realism of, for example, Melchior d’Hondeceter to the refinement in the bird studies of Margot Holtman. Penetrating is the work of Leon Adriaans that paints swans on raw material such as animal feed bags. Thus the real farming life enters the arts, that does not mean that his work Swan (1987-1989) is just as graceful and stylish.

Birds are spread throughout the Kunstrai, such as in the stand of the Utrecht Gallery Heejsteck# where artist Peter Vos shows an intensely tranquil bird portrait of the very rare glasses duck. As he displays the shades of the bird against an empty background, the plumage is just art deco. Engagement and a bond with current affairs can only be found sporadically, or it must be WOW now from Rob Malasch of the Amsterdam gallery serious matters. With this project he offers young artists the opportunity to show all conceivable cross-overs, performances and artworks, inspired by idols from contemporary art.

This edition of the Kunstrai outlines a colorful art climate, decorative to the eye, but is rather conservative than rough or disturbing. We see Mediterranean terraces, troubling horses, rowers on the water, swimmers in a river, but also butterflies, certainly painted tastefully. In fact, the most oppressive and penetrating oil paint on canvas Der Baum (1985) from Armando at Galerie Mia Joosten. Then we are back at the bitter eighties, when the art fair started. In a fierce contrast with black and lots of white, Armando (1929-2018) expresses something that you could call horror. Sublime.

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