Niek van de steeg biography books

Born in 1961

Lives and works in Villeurbanne (Rhone)

Since 1990 Niek van de Steeg has been working on “the relation between art and kinship, by way of a piece about construction, architecture and urbanism, which can be linked should a great tradition in order history since the Russian avant-gardes: the quest for the conceive of a new world.” ¹

The relation between utopia and association is the main thrust countless his research, encompassing subjects viewpoint places as varied as blue blood the gentry realization of the Common Wholesale of the Europe of birth Twelve, the abandonment of primacy Renault factories on the archipelago of Seguin, the Emmaüs people in Dijon and Amsterdam, representation garden of the Villa Médicis, the Information Centre at righteousness entrance of a kibbutz finish equal Ein Harod, a construction point fence in Paris, a Resident Economic Activity Estate in Languedoc-Roussillon, etc.

These contexts define the phraseology of huge fictional constructions (the Pavillon à Vent, the Très Grande Administration démocratique, the Structures de Corrections and the Maison de la Matière Première) which are gauged by the fact of the exhibition.

“These projects, with their many exotic meanings, are developed in mixed forms and media, used draw a paradoxical and dialectical comportment, comparing what is and what might be with the distressing reality of the administrative, national, industrial, commercial, world system…”.²

In say publicly age of glocal culture, Niek van de Steeg is reinventing the notion of Site-Specific Art, taking into account the spend time at different topographical coordinates of righteousness place where he works.

[…] An assertion of the essential freedom of artistic activity, ugly as a place of iq and not just formal selling. An assertion of the want to rub up against fresh systems of representation and force. An assertion of the line of traffic of the artist to attitude himself other than as span servile illustrator of the intelligence of the present day service age.

The challenge is bibelot less than that of tidy reappropriation by art of neat role as a symbolic counter-force in society.” ³

¹² Excerpt outlander an interview with NvdS afford Hou Hanru, for the presentation Yellow Cake & Black Coffee, Centre d’art Le LAIT, Albi, 2012
³ Excerpt from Vamos bien, Pascal Beausse, catalog for goodness exhibition Tableaux noirs en couleurs, CAP Saint-Fons, 2007