As an artist, Stijn ter Braak (1995) takes the crafting of Sinterklaas surprises to a higher level. He makes everyday still lifes from paper, cardboard, construction and household waste, whereby he – sculptor and painter at the same time – gives the three-dimensional suggestion one last push with paint. Bee Gallery Mieke van Schaijk in Den Bosch, Ter Braak shows a still life that you can enter. He has recreated his entire Antwerp bathroom in full size, including intimate details such as medicine strips, a contact lens container, a condom package and his girlfriend’s tampons. Nothing in the room is what it seems, everything has been put together with pleasure and ingenuity from other materials. The tap is made of cardboard and aluminum foil. The hanging towel is made of dark gray sprayed artificial grass. An after-shave bottle is an inverted port glass with a cut piece of PVC tube as a cap. Even the long-legged spider in the corner isn’t real: it’s a drop of hardened glue holding a few broom hairs together.
It is certainly not a hyper-realistic installation. You imagine yourself in a bathroom, but up close you can clearly see the handiwork, just as you always perceive paint and image at the same time in an impressionist painting. In the meantime, the illusion continues to work at full force, perhaps mainly thanks to Ter Braak’s attention to the many, many details in the bathroom: dirty sealants in the shower cubicle, socks under the heating, a tail of toothpaste hanging from the tube. You really start to see a painted piece of cardboard on the floor as a bath mat because of the folded corner. It is the multitude of details that determines the lifelikeness, not the precision of the execution. And this is actually only half the battle. There is also a great mind fuck in the installation that makes the small exhibition unforgettable. To experience it you have to go to Den Bosch yourself.
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