Galerie Maurits van de Laar

David Bade (1970) addresses themes like discrimination, social inequality and economic power structures, which he depicts in an bold, sometimes absurdist manner. The humor in the work makes the often charged topics accessible and offers an opening to a positive approach to social problems. In the exhibition David Bade shows a selection of drawings, paintings and some sculptures.

Nathan Henderson (1978) is an American artist who lives and works in Berlin. In his youth he wanted to be a cartoonist, but also developed a fascination for the old masters that he started to copy. Dissatisfied with the result, which he found too pretentious, he decided to combine both. This resulted in virtuoso quotes from artists such as Giotto, Van Eijk and Albrecht Dürer in which cartoon characters related to Disney, The Simpsons or underground comics appear. The often large scale drawings are a strange mix of high and low culture, humor and seriousness, past and present.

Sebastiaan Schlicher (1974) started a series of drawings in 2022 with the title Pink Adrenaline, a nickname for the chemical compound Adrenochrome that can induce thinking disorders and delusions. The series was created during the lockdowns in the corona pandemic and reflects the feeling of isolation, emotional confusion and powerlessness. The drawings have an overwhelming energy of winding lines in which faces and figures emerge and fictitious diary entries and story fragments wander around. Earlier, Schlicher began experimenting with sound works constructed from a tangle of transistors, resistors and wires that produce an unpredictable series of sounds and rhythms. The assembly of winding wires has the same energy as the Pink Adrenaline drawings and seems to symbolize the inscrutable algorithms that increasingly dominate our lives. In addition to the drawings, a few of these noise machines can be seen and heard in the exhibition.