Antonietta Peeters (1967)
Antonietta Peeters sees the landscape not as a flat backdrop against which she places a subject, but as space. 'When you try to feel it, space is nothing,' says Peeters. When you look at it, it has colour and shape, but when you move in it, the space moves around you. It yields, opens, and compresses itself elsewhere.'* Peeters considers all the elements of a landscape almost tangible things, and these are the elements from which she constructs paintings and drawings. She combines air, water, earth and light into what we experience as one landscape, one atmosphere, one space. At the same time, Peeters abstracts the many faces of that space in her paintings and drawings, by dividing her compositions into multiple fields. Are we looking at a two-dimensional play of colour and shape, or into eight individual panoramic views?
Peeters also extends her musings into three dimensions, in crocheted sculptures. With the same questions in mind, the artist stitches together works that she then stretches over a frame of wire or mesh. What exactly is part of the object, and where does the object end and the space it occupies begin?
* G. de Bruin et al, Antonietta Peeters:Swamp, Amsterdam 2000, p.58
