HAN VAN WETERING

Han van Wetering (1948), born in Maastricht, The Netherlands, currently lives and works in Maastricht. Van Wetering graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Maastricht (1968) and Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht (1972). Van Wetering has exhibited many times in The Netherlands and abroad. His sculptures can be found in public spaces at some thirty locations in The Netherlands and Germany. Van Wetering is best known in Maastricht for the bronze Sint Servaas at the police station, the Zaate Herremenie at the Vrijthof, the bronze doors of Het Gouvernement, and the bronze doors of the Natural History Museum. His work has been included in the collections of Bonnefantenmuseum (Maastricht), Museum van Bommel van Dam (Venlo), and numerous corporate and private collections.

If you look up, fathoming the immense space of a ceiling fresco from the height of the baroque period, for example The Triumph of Divine Providence by Pietro da Cortona in the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, the ground is knocked from under your feet. There, in a sudden endless abyss, natural laws run riot. Jeering saints spin like mottled humming tops on their colorful axes, their loose robes twisting around their elongated bodies like snakes; gaunt horses gallop through breakers of air; angels tumble crisscross downwards and plunge upwards again just as effortlessly, their floating skirts and beating wings carelessly molded by the fickle speed of light; streamers hurtle through space like peals of laughter, a vain handhold for eyes seeking direction.

Van Wetering’s sculptures also seem to have fallen from unimaginable heights. They lie naked on their backs, shameless, hilarious, orgiastic. I thought of their baroque predecessors: the exalted virgins pierced with arrows, saints that twisted on their pedestals with divine passion. Van Wetering’s sculptures parody this because they recognize it not as divine mercy but as wounded lecherousness. That’s why they delight in their confusion, their reckless in-jokes as transitional figures between man and animal. They show who they are not, turn themselves inside out so that a bleeding heart becomes a fiery vagina, a phallus shoots rigidly upwards between intestines, a hat grows rank on a head, drains hold the skin open. – Text by Lex ter Braak

Exhibitions at Galerie Nasty Alice: Art Rotterdam 2025 . KunstRAI 2023 . Art The Hague 2022 . They come in all shapes and sizes 2021 .  Appèl Galeries 2020 . Stranger Things 2019 .