Guido van der Werve (NL/FI)
Number Fourteen
Kling & Bang Gallery
6-14 April
Van der Werve pursued studies in industrial design, archaeology, music composition, and Russian language and literature at several universities in the Netherlands. He studied visual art at Rietveld and was a resident artist at the Rijksacademy in Amsterdam. He was born in Papendrecht, the Netherlands in 1977 and currently lives in Finland and Germany.
Van der Werve has created a variety of works, including a series of film and videos and a musical composition, titled by number in chronological order from two to fourteen. He often plays the protagonist in his satirical yet deadpan work, investigating such themes as melancholy and alienation. The film on display; nummer veertien, van der Werve’s latest film and a key work in van der Werve’s oeuvre, poetically interweaves tales of Alexander the Great, the death of Frédéric Chopin, and van der Werve’s own personal narrative. It documents the artist’s 1,000-mile triathlon – swimming, biking, and running – from Warsaw to Paris, from Chopin’s native land of Poland to his grave in France. The work follows the structure of a requiem (composed by Van der Werve himself) consisting of 3 parts and 12 acts.