The Back Room - Arie de Groot

Arie de Groot (Hendrik Ido Ambacht, 1937 – Rotterdam, 2016) developed a unique idiom and worked mostly out of the public eye. His oeuvre mainly consists of works on paper that incorporate vulnerable materials such as cardboard and aluminium foil. De Groot was as much influenced by artists – such as Paul Klee and John Cage –poems and music as by ethnographic and traditional folk art. His work is subdued rather than spectacular and sits in stark contrast to many of his contemporaries. His practice articulates a great wonderment for life and its mysteries. His oeuvre demonstrates a clear trend in which he increasingly indulged a freedom for form and colour.

The Back Room
This joint project examined the position occupied by both institutions – one as an established museum, and the other as a contemporary exhibition space without a collection – at local and national level. Through this collaboration, TENT and the museum aimed to reveal the subjective process of being included in or excluded from the art canon. The artists presented in The Back Room are partly collected by museums. However, their work has not always received the attention it deserves. The Back Room, therefore, raised questions about the role and position of the artist: how does the artist build a reputation and what factors influence their success?

Paul Beckman, Arie de Groot, Esma Yiğitoğlu
The series of four solo exhibitions at TENT focused on artists who have occupied an important position in the Rotterdam art world, but are largely unknown to the present generation: Paul Beckman (1946–2000), Arie de Groot (1937–2016), Charly van Rest (1949) en Esma Yiğitoğlu (1944–2009). Their oeuvres are relevant today, because the strategies and materials they used return in the work of the younger generation of artists.

The Back Room at TENT ran concurrently with Project Rotterdam at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, which focused on a younger generation of artists not yet known as institutional figures.