Nelleke Beltjens, Hedwig Brouckaert, Jorinde Voigt
RE/PRO/DUCING COMPLEXITY

RE/PRO/DUCING COMPLEXITY presents drawings and drawing-related works by three young women artists from three European countries: Nelleke Beltjens, Hedwig Brouckaert and Jorinde Voigt. In recent years all three artists have emerged on the international scene with demanding and innovative approaches in the drawing medium.

Our society is characterized by rapidly increasing complexity, not only in important sectors like the economy, science and technology, where even experts have trouble keeping abreast of developments. The growth of complexity may be felt down into our daily lives, changing all areas of life. This simultaneously constitutes both enrichment and mental overload, a broadening of our horizons and a loss of orientation. Beltjens, Brouckaert and Voigt address this theme of complex and intricate reality and the perception of it, each using their means.

Nelleke Beltjens understands her drawings as metaphors for the incomprehensibility of life, human existence and its conditions; Hedwig Brouckaert works with redundant visual material, such as that disseminated by the mass media, which she alienates and “neutralizes” with her selections and layerings; In diagram-like drawings, Jorinde Voigt develops new structures of order and relationships between selected areas of reality, creating spaces for the viewer’s imagination in this way.

As different as the respective artistic approaches of the three woman artists are, they are equally highly complex, in keeping with the famous statement by the sociologist and systems theorist Niklas Luhmann who said: “Only complexity can reduce complexity.”