Gerti Bierenbroodspot (1940) - The Golden Age Revisited

Gerti Bierenbroodspot
The Golden Age Revisited
1994
Acryl op aluminium
195 x 271,5 cm

Provenance: especially designed for the Dinning Room of SS. Rijndam (Hal), Holland Amerika Lijn


Bierenbroodspot always walks barefooted, whether over the rough unlandscaped grounds of archaeological ruins or when she paces on the stones of temple floors. And she is always barefoot when she paints, indoors or out. So, she literally made footloose contact with alabaster, the ancient stone of choice for temple pavements, that soft, translucent stone with surprise veins of colour in the heart of it. Just as she abhors painting on untouched paper or an empty canvas, but always primes away its whiteness with a happenstance of colour and structure, so alabaster’s streaks of mineral tones suggest to her an inner vitality in the stone. As if the stone is waiting to change its face.

Bierenbroodspot (born in Amsterdam) began to draw in the studio of her famous uncle, Leo Gestel, an important Dutch modernist. She studied at the National Academy of Art in Amsterdam. Bierenbroodspot uses archaeological worlds as starting points for her paintings, sculptures and wall-rubbings, creating a highly personal vision of a modernity, grand in theme as well as in manner. Like the painters of a last Golden Age, Bierenbroodspot spends three months every year travelling along the magnificent archaeological trails of the Middle East. During her life she has been living and working among the ruins of three great Caravan Cities: Petra, Palmyra, and Baalbeck. Gerti Bierenbroodspot is a leading Dutch artist and works as a painter, sculptor, writer and poet.