Press announcement 27.11.2009
West is proud to present: 5 ROOMS by Jasper Niens

December 3rd – 6th, 2009 – NADA Art Fair, Miami Beach

West is introducing a new, monumental installation by Jasper Niens (NL, 1980) especially made for NADA Art Fair. Earlier this year Niens successfully presented the site-specific work Handicap principle II at The International Art Show Art Forum Berlin.

Jasper Niens is a kind of architect of his audience’s fortune. He aims at breaking with behavioral patterns and flowing movements of human beings in public spaces and manages to capture his audience, literally. His installations live on their environment and on their visitors who are released from conventions as soon as they participate in the artwork. Nevertheless they may have to follow different rules then. Niens creates this for him so typical effect of manipulation by constructing strong, monumental installations with elementary shapes and harsh materials. That makes his interventions formally very confronting and forceful; as regards content they are subtle.

5 ROOMS is another of those spaces in which the audience is trapped by the artist. While we pass through several doors and rooms our expectations increase enormously; but as a visitor to an art fair who expects to see ‘everything’, we might end up questioning ourselves why there is nothing to see except white walls.
And this is Niens’ masterstroke: transforming a space at a hectic fairground by using its own means of construction into an ‘empty’, transcendent environment that evokes everything from sensory and cognitive confusion to pure spirituality and allows reflexion on art, its context and one’s own behavior. Experience of space and behaving in a certain space are the ingredients that complete 5 ROOMS.
In previous works Niens emphasized the need of manual work and solidarity by placing heavy, moveable objects in gallery rooms or fair stands that demand unexpected performances from the audience. This time he confronts us with non-functionality, emptiness and subjectivity. The varied forms of art surrounding us at an art fair, offer very individual experiences but also contain a large amount of fiction. To that extent, 5 ROOMS is also a statement about its own context and environment.

Niens participated, in among other places, exhibitions at Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, at Tent, Rotterdam, at West, The Hague and at the international sculpture route of Art Zuid, Amsterdam.

We would be very happy to welcome you to NADA Art Fair Miami Beach and invite you to visit booth #114.

Kind regards, Marie-José Sondeijker
For high res. photos or more info you can call us: 0031(0)70.392.53.59 or use info@west-denhaag.nl