Artwork Data

Title

Zieken te bed

Artist

Jan Snoeck

Year

1979

Material

keramiek

Dimensions

h. 20-112 cm

Artwork Location

Address

Lijnbaan, Den Haag

City district

Centrum

GPS data

52.074476473479, 4.3013928556419 View on map

Artwork Description

Text

A walk along sculptures in The Hague takes you past more than ten works of art by Jan Snoeck. Not all of them are immediately recognisable as being by Snoeck. Because in addition to his typical ceramic sculptures in fresh colours and with soft curves, of which 'Sick in bed' at Westeinde Hospital is one, we also come across completely different work. For instance, in the city of Utrecht there is an abstract bronze sculpture of around 5 metres in height 'Rasp', which indeed looks like an enormous rasp.

Snoeck's The Hague sculptures do not offer a complete overview of his oeuvre, but they do give insight into his versatility as a sculptor; into his use of diverse forms and various materials. What also stands out is his predilection for clay, which began in the 1960s. In this soft material, later fired hard, he developed an entirely personal idiom. A strongly recognisable form language, in which stylised human and animal figures, sitting, lying or walking, come to the foreground. Often with big noses.

Yet it was not primarily the soft material that attracted him to clay. In an interview with Max Danser for Pulchri's magazine in 1986, Snoeck says: 'I did a lot of chopping in stone, which I thought was fantastic. But because I had a great need to work with colour, I started making ceramic sculptures.

It is large and colourful, the ceramic sculpture 'Sick in bed'. It consists of ten beds in a row. One is empty, the others are occupied by patients. A single patient is sitting upright. The sculptures offer a sunny and uncomplicated remedy for hospital decay. So typically Snoeck that the artist's signature on each of the ten beds seems almost superfluous.

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