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Exposition view Where the devil don’t stay, at gallery Piet Hein Eek in Eindhoven, the Netherlands
Photo: Fenestra Ateliers

MARC MULDERS

-YOU ARE ACTUALLY WORKING ON TOUCHING THE LIGHT

Angela van der Burght

"You are actually working on touching the light" Marc Mulders

With this quote, I would like to introduce the work of Marc Mulders.
For years Marc Mulders was my hero because he was brave enough to smear his paint altogether as long as the oil colors had become grey, cousing the 'thickening' of his subjects and images aswell. It was courageous in that time to make such statements and to be a catholic believer.

Now he is my hero just because of the opposite: he paints his glass paintings on clear float glass making the colors as clear and transparent as possible.

Posted 23 September 2014

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On a question posed in the article Outclass the Devil Eindhovens Dagblad 18/09/2014 by Anneke van Wolfswinkel says that visitors at Mulders’ latest exposition Where the devil don’t stay, at gallery Piet Hein Eek in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, won’t recognize the influence of Islamic caligraphy so easily in his abstract paintings. Mulders responded: "No, but you don't have to. Vincent van Gogh wrote in his letters constantly about Christ, but he never painted a Christ or Mary: just nature. So it is with me too. But that the sources of inspiration for my work are Christian and Islamic art, of course, is called a statement. I believe in the reconciliation of Christianity and Islam. Between those two traditions are many similarities, and in both, is much beauty to be found. And the devil we should easily defeat by beauty. I see that as my mission. "

Marc Mulders
Photo: Marc Mulders

Marc Mulders (Tilburg, NL, 1958) lives and works in the country in the neighborhood of the city of Eindhoven; is a Dutch painter; watercolorist; photographer and stained-glass artist. He is best known for his oil paintings in which he follows the course of nature. In the spring and summer Mulders paints tulips, irises and roses; in the fall and winter, he focuses on wildlife like pheasants and hares. Both the flowers as the animals he paints are ' to life '. 

For this purpose Mulder used to set up still lifes in his studio in which he placed next to the flower or the dead animal, some inspirational photos. Now, since he moved to the country he has only to open the studio doors to be in the nature surrounding him. At the press meeting for the exposition Where the devil don’t stay Mulders talked about no longer bringing flowers into his atelier as they are all around him now in specially sown flower fields that allow him to see the space behind the flowers. “In that process I get more and more fascinated by the infinity behind the flowers. But that space is an abstraction, so I'm going to abstract painting. That's really a quest.” With his works in Eindhoven he showed an optimistic vision. And by developing autonomous art into decorative art he gives us this feast of life and passes on the little gifts he found in himself in nature.

Marc Mulders at work with GBB Glas Bewerkingsbedrijf Brabant Atelier
Photo: Marc Mulders

Window The last Judgement,  St . Jan Kathedraat Den Bosch
Photo: Marc Mulders

Besides painting in recent years, Mulders has increasingly focused on manufacturing stained glass windows. The most famous of these are the window for the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam and the St. Jan's Cathedral in Den Bosch. To feed the discussion on the window The last Judgement, and more specifically on the bottom left panel there is an airplane referencing 11/9/2001 N.Y. that’s positioned inside of an upside-down Iris in hell, of this Mulders wrote: “Since 2001, terrorism has been one of the themes on my iconographic agenda. At the time, I was already making collages devoted to this theme in the artists’ magazine ‘100.000.000’ which I published myself…

Detail window The last Judgement,  St . Jan Kathedraat Den Bosch
Photo: Marc Mulders

The hands as well as soul of every artist depicting a biblical theme in his own day and age will be impacted by the crucial events of his time, which will then be transformed into his own personal iconography. And every artist whose daily work is suddenly interrupted by a far-reaching and tragic event outside his workshop will feel a need and even compulsion to note down, register, codify and document the suffering and human shortcomings he has seen, thereby also preventing them from being forgotten (e.g. New Babylon by Constant: the Baader-Meinhof works by Gerhard Richter: Picasso’s Guernica and the execution of Emperor Maximilian by Goya). This is also why, for the Last Judgment, in addition to the generally accepted division between Heaven, Purgatory and Hell, I wished to depict an image in hell which is recognizable to all of us and which gives meaning to the expression ‘a hell on earth’.”

Stichting De Pont, in Tilburg, wrote on occasion of his solo exposition that the oeuvre of Marc Mulders is determined by what might be the major theme in the history of art: the eternal cycle of life and death. The expression of living and dying, death and resurrection, has been tradition for a long time in the Western painting and Mulders places himself conscious in that tradition. In series of paintings he works out this theme and he explores the pictorial features. His working method is by no means objective or purely observational, but extremely relevant and loaded. Painting means for Mulders empathy, and his expressive, impasto paintings are the repercussions of his struggle with both the topics like this with the subject matter in which he transforms them. 

Window St Bavo Kathedraal Haarlem, Babtistery
Photo: Marc Mulders

Window A Garden of Glass / Een Tuin van glas, Nieuwe Kerk Amsterdam
Photo: Marc Mulders

In his last expositions, the marriage between autonomous painting and decorative applied arts is, through the mixed lay-out, a feast of recognition as the abstract colour fields and the ornamental signs force the spectator to zoom in-and-out, to understand the forms, shapes and meanings within the changing light that absorbs or reflects on the different surfaces.
So if the devil won’t stay, I would!
 
Angela van der Burght
Translation: Erica H. Adams
 
See video: Hollandse Meesters - Marc Mulders
Regisseur Jeroen Berkvens maakte dit portret van Mulders.

See more on the exposition Where the devil don’t stay>

Flowerfield surrounding Marc Mulders Studio
Photo: Marc Mulders

Waterpainting
Photo: Marc Mulders

Flowerfields surrounding Marc Mulders studio
Photo: Marc Mulders

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