The Elements – Manon Uphoff

Central to the exhibition is the complex legacy of the work of Uphoff’s father, Piet Uphoff (1914-2001), who painted in the tradition of the Utrecht School alongside his contemporaries Pyke Koch (1901-1991) and Joop Moesman (1909-1988). Based on autobiographical information, Uphoff’s novel Falling Is Like Flying features her father under the name Henri Elias Hendrikus Holbein (HEHH for short). The most striking element in the family’s post-war home is the father’s numerous oil paintings, mostly copies of works by great masters featuring nude women but with the heads of his wife or daughters. HEHH ‘was a man from the age of the genius and belief in the free state called brilliance.’ In that art-historical and socially accepted free state, HEHH believed himself to be lord and master over the thoughts and actions of his wife and daughters. The exhibition questions the inviolability of this exemplary male artist by creating an environment in which words and images enter into new connections and create new meanings.

The exhibition consists of three rooms.

Room 1

In the first room, human-sized, frightening, and fascinating insects and other creatures are displayed against the gloomy backdrop of a kaleidoscopic wallpaper full of repetitions, mirroring, and picture-in-picture-in-picture.

Room 2

A video installation is set up in the second room. Here one can see how four paintings created by P. E. H. Uphoff are exposed to the elements—to stones, air, fire, and water. The visitor witnesses the search for appropriate rituals to say farewell to, or to cope with, a fraught legacy.

Room 3

The last room displays fragile drawings in blue against a white background. The paper is extremely thin and wrinkled from the moisture of ink and paint. No frames, no protection, just the play of light.