We love introducing you to our favourite art and each art’otel serves as a blank canvas to its signature artist. At art’otel Amsterdam, Atelier Van Lieshout is in control, complementing the décor in our public areas and guestrooms with sculptures, installations and furniture influenced by art, architecture and design.
Joep van Lieshout
Joep van Lieshout, who lives and works in Rotterdam, is the artistic mastermind behind Atelier Van Lieshout. Joep began as a solo artist, creating objects in brightly coloured polyester – the material that would become his trademark – from the early 1980s onwards. In 1995 he founded Atelier Van Lieshout. Rules and regulations are wasted on Joep van Lieshout. Ever since becoming a professional artist in the 1980s, he has attacked the art world’s conventions. Over the past three decades, Van Lieshout has established a multidisciplinary practice that produces works on the borders between art, design, and architecture. By investigating the thin line between manufacturing art and mass-producing functional objects, he seeks to find the boundaries between fantasy and function, between fertility and destruction.
The Course of Life
Recurring themes in the work of Atelier Van Lieshout are power, politics and autarky, as well as the more classical themes of life, its creation and its end in death. With his body of work, Van Lieshout was ranked as one of the top five most recognised Dutch artists by renowned Elsevier Magazine, and has attained international recognition and exhibited at major art institutions and art collections worldwide.
Throughout art’otel Amsterdam, the recurring theme in the work of Atelier Van Lieshout is the “Course of Life”, and all 120 artworks within the hotel’s public areas and guestrooms have this theme at their core. The Course of Life refers to the different stages of human life, with works focusing on the central themes of life and death, beginning and end, alpha and omega – and everything that lies in between. Some in more explicit ways than others. Grab the Art Guide at reception and explore it for yourself!
Accolades
Liehout’s work can be found in all major art countries and cities around the world, from Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, to New York’s MoMa and Paris’ Centre Pompidou to name just a few of a very extensive list of accolades with an array of awards since 1991!
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Behind the artwork (continued)
Astronaut
Astronaut is on a roll and going places. But again, he’s stuck on a pedestal, go-to-bag at the ready and all. He is caught in limbo, as is reflected in the material used which looks simultaneously futuristic and fossilised.
Dancing Rabbit
Dancing Rabbits symbolises fertility and life’s very beginning. AVL’s Dancing Rabbits are trapped in a frame, welding them together no matter what.
They might as well do a little dance or embrace each other for a kiss.
Puppet Hands
Free markets create incentives for self-interested people to act in the public interest. This is what the 18th-century philosopher Adam Smith famously called ‘the invisible hand’. No need for government intervention if the economy itself nudges people along.
Knights
These knights are loyal to the job at hand and completely guileless when it comes to its purpose. They look tough and lost at the same time. They are the friendly and slightly goofy guards of the gates to utopia, which they themselves will never enter.
First Supper Lamp
All endings have beginnings. So the last supper, the climax of Christian eulogy, was preceded by a first supper. At this starting point, nothing was clear yet and things were meaningless. There’s even confusion about the absence of food.
