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febbraio 05, 2019 - Centre Pompidou

JOS HOUWELING, 'AMSTERDAM SEVENTIES' at Centre Pompidou, Paris


Comunicato Stampa disponibile solo in lingua originale. 

Beginning in February 2019, the Centre Pompidou is devoting an original exhibition
to the series of photocollages of Amsterdam made by #joshouweling, a Dutch artist born in 1943. These collages of thousands of photos were made in the 1970s and compiled
in the popular book, 700 Centenboek Amsterdam.
Published on the occasion of the 700th anniversary of the city of Amsterdam in 1975,
the book consists of 175 large 60 x 40 cm plates and details the Venice of the North as seen through the mischievous eye of #joshouweling.
It is the artist’s declaration of love for his native city.

700 Centenboek Amsterdam is now seen as one of the major works of the 1970s, half-way between
a conceptual and artistic approach and a playful and popular approach to photography.
It is one of the best-selling photo albums in the Netherlands. In 2016, all 233 collages in the project, both published plates and additional research, were added to the Centre Pompidou collections.

As an artist, typographer, exhibition curator and teacher, Houweling asks a question that is both simple and inexhaustible: what makes up a city and what are the elements of an urban structure?

His photocollages thus defined series of urban motifs and constructed veritable thematic typologies: Lege huizen [Empty houses], Grachtenwater [Canal water], Transportfietsen [Transport bicycles], Naambordjes [Nameplates],Brievenbussen [Letterboxes], Bromfietsen [Mopeds], Sexartikelenwinkels [Sales counters for erotic items] ...

He endeavours to inventory these objects, placing them on the same level without any hierarchy
or commentary, thus producing large, entertaining theme-based plates that allow the poetic to slip between the interstices in the ordinary. The popular and alternative character of the city
of Amsterdam in the 1970s appears before our eyes, revealing the anti-establishment spirit
of a young and rebellious generation.

PHOTOGRAPHING UNTIL THERE IS NOTHING LEFT TO PHOTOGRAPH

700 Centenboek Amsterdam fits into a certain logic of photography, consisting in the desire
to exhaust the totality of a subject, in this case, conducting the most exhaustive inventory possible of the city of Amsterdam. We find this approach in the American artist Ed Ruscha (1937),
who photographed Every Building on Sunset-Strip (1966), in Christian Boltanski (1944) in 1974 with Inventory of Objects Belonging to a Woman from Bois-Colombe and again in Sol LeWitt (1928) with his photographic collections of objects (Autobiography, 1980).

In 2025, the city of Amsterdam will celebrate its 750th anniversary and Jos Houweling’s book will be 50 years old. The Dutch city has changed greatly over the years, at least as much
as our way of looking at cities. The virtual cities in which we navigate today constitute a digital empire of signs that were prefigured by Jos Houweling’s playful and mischievous spirit.

CURATOR
Florian Ebner, Head of the Department of the Photography Department, National Museum of Modern Art Assisté par Emmanuelle Etchecopar-Etchart , Conservation Officer, National Museum of Modern Art

Production Manager : Céline Makragic

JOS HOUWELING, AMSTERDAM SEVENTIES

6 FEBRUARY- 29 APRIL 2019

MUSEUM, FOCUS ROOM - LEVEL 5

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