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Lot Essay
Founded in 1995 by the sculptor Joep van Lieshout, Atelier van Lieshout (AVL) is a multidisciplinary design collective that creates controversial and often subversive works blurring any distinction between contemporary art, design and architecture. The work of AVL is not created from the singular vision of van Lieshout, but from that of a creative team. So integral is this notion of communality (as well as self sufficiency) that in 2001 van Lieshout founded, around their atelier in the port of Rotterdam, an anarchic free state where past, current and future employees could live: AVL-Ville. For this year long anarchist experiment van Lieshout's AVL-Ville had its own constitution, flag and currency and, intended to be free from dependence on the state, included facilities such as a mobile farm, a canteen, a place to create alcohol and medicine, an energy resource power plant and water purification system as well as a workshop for the production of weapons.
Extending from machinery to sculptures, furniture to buildings, installations to draft utopian and dystopian cities, AVL is best known for boldly provocative creations that celebrate life, sex and death with a fixation on the human body. Modesty and restraint receive short shrift in their art. While power and politics are also themes, death is the most poignant and recurrent and, within that leitmotif, the human skull is a reappearing form.
The 'Sensory Deprivation Skull' of 2007 was inspired by skulls Joep van Lieshout created in the late 1990s as well as the 'Wellness Skull' of earlier the same year: a skull, larger even than the present one, which included within a few places for rest including a bath and a sauna. These led to still other interpretations such as the 2009 Alpha & Omega bus stops commissioned by the municipality of Gemeente in The Netherlands which take the form of an egg and a skull and are placed at the beginning and end of the bus route, perhaps symbolizing beginning and end, life and death.
This theme is again expressed in the piece offered here. An exploration of isolation and private spaces, the 'Sensory Deprivation Skull' presents a cell where, once tucked within the secluded chamber residing behind its closed doors, one is cut off from the world. Perhaps then, within the mind, one is in the place where we are truly most alone and the place where we begin and end.
Extending from machinery to sculptures, furniture to buildings, installations to draft utopian and dystopian cities, AVL is best known for boldly provocative creations that celebrate life, sex and death with a fixation on the human body. Modesty and restraint receive short shrift in their art. While power and politics are also themes, death is the most poignant and recurrent and, within that leitmotif, the human skull is a reappearing form.
The 'Sensory Deprivation Skull' of 2007 was inspired by skulls Joep van Lieshout created in the late 1990s as well as the 'Wellness Skull' of earlier the same year: a skull, larger even than the present one, which included within a few places for rest including a bath and a sauna. These led to still other interpretations such as the 2009 Alpha & Omega bus stops commissioned by the municipality of Gemeente in The Netherlands which take the form of an egg and a skull and are placed at the beginning and end of the bus route, perhaps symbolizing beginning and end, life and death.
This theme is again expressed in the piece offered here. An exploration of isolation and private spaces, the 'Sensory Deprivation Skull' presents a cell where, once tucked within the secluded chamber residing behind its closed doors, one is cut off from the world. Perhaps then, within the mind, one is in the place where we are truly most alone and the place where we begin and end.