Artwork Data
Artwork Location
Address
Ambachtsgaarde, Den Haag
City district
Escamp
GPS data
52.035785399722, 4.2653832888161 View on map
Artwork Description
Text
Girl with kite' was created in 1962. At the time, artist Theo van der Nahmer was fully engaged in the vibrant artistic life of The Hague. He was a member of the artists' group Fugare (1960-1967) and before that one of the members of the artists' group Verve (1951-1957). Both groups played an important role in the revival of art in The Hague after the Second World War. The art movement that emerged around these two groups of artists is called the New Haagse School.
Verve members expressed themselves in a predominantly modern figurative way and founder Theo Bitter called Verve art 'a Hague answer to Cobra'. Fugare was a logical sequel to Verve. The first two sentences of Fugare's founding manifesto read: 'We, the artists of Fugare, give answers in our work to the latest problems of the visual arts. We are abstract, abstraction or experimentation'. That these opening words did not constitute a straitjacket is proven by the figurative work of a number of members, painters and sculptors, including Van der Nahmer. This 'Girl with a Kite' is an example of it.
It is a figurative bronze sculpture of a girl holding a kite. Van der Nahmer did work in the abstract, but his emphasis is on an expressive translation of reality. Fantasy, kept in check by reality, that's what it's about,' he said in 1977 in the neighbourhood newsletter Benoordenhout. What drove him as an artist can be seen in the girl. The sculpture is expressive, because it is not an exact copy of visible reality, but the result of shaped feelings and ideas. He did this best with wax. All the forms that filled his head, down to the smallest details, he could express with it. Right down to the bows in the kite's tail. And then to have it cast in bronze.