The Shooting Gallery is proud to present New Works by Antistrot. This group is made up of six Dutch artists that use pop imagery to create chaotic, emotional scenes. Please join us for the opening reception of New Works by Antistrot on Saturday, February 6th, 2010, from 7-11 pm.
Antistrot’s new body of works showcases its maturation as a group of six artists working closer than ever before. This depth is reflected in finer line work and fewer text balloons within the paintings. Antistrot has coined the term “docudrama” to describe their inspiration for this exhibition. Docudrama is a collection of material from media, comics, fashion mags, porn mags, old film books, 1970s war books, and even from the conversations taking place while the artists work. This docudrama is then taken out of context and placed on a canvas with several other images in a spontaneous, unplanned composition. The resulting conglomerate may convey the central character’s scream of emotions or even a nightmarish landscape.
Antistrot takes a unique approach to collaborative art. Instead of taking turns, the artists sit around a table and paint one canvas simultaneously. These paintings are executed using Indian ink for bold outlines and fresco lithe for color. Antistrot never prepares a sketch for its pieces, leaving the composition and content to be discovered during the process of artmaking. In the same spirit of spontaneity, Antistrot will be executing a mural within the gallery to accompany its new works.
Antistrot was founded in 1997 by six students of the Willem de Kooning Academie in Rotterdam. The group currently includes Bruno Ferro Xavier Da Silva, Marco Kruyt, Michiel Ladrave, Paul Borchers, Silas Schletterer, and Johan Kleinjan. They take their name from Professor Strot: a teacher whose ideology seemed restrictive to these six young artists. The group began creating and distributing their own zines which then flourished into ten years of collaborative murals, installations, performances and musical events. Antistrot has now exhibited works in GEM (The Hague), 3rd Ward (New York), Sara Tecchia (Rome), Boijmans van Beuningen (Rotterdam), Hugh Lane Gallery (Dublin), Centre of Contemporary Art (Prague), and Zedosbois (Lisbon). In 2008, Aqua Art Fair in Miami commissioned Antistrot to complete a large scale, outdoor mural that can still be seen in the Aqua courtyard.
