Exhibition “Openness” including Yvette Taminiau
by Demi Falkmann
The exhibition at Municipal Bonds Openness, on view at Minnesota Street Project in Gallery 200, presents four important female artists including the Dutch artist Yvette Taminiau. Openness features complimentary bodies of work, wherein each artist investigates a singular direction, inspired by materials and their consequences: Austin Thomas with ghost marking monoprints; Bara Jichova Tyson with analog collages; Danielle Dimston with chiaroscuro watercolors; and Yvette Taminiau with associative newsprint paintings. Yvette Taminiau’s newsprint paintings comprise a dialogue between the artist and the page. She transforms newspaper pages in an associative manner, responding to the images, headlines, articles, and the layout of the page. Her approach is intuitive and suggestive—while her academic background, with its strong reliance on analytical frameworks, is reflected in her selection of topics and articles from the newspapers. Dutch, French, and English news act as her referential canvas, from economic issues to political coverage to cultural icons.
The artists reception for the exhibition is on Saturday, Sep 7, 5-8pm. Yvette will fly in from Amsterdam and be in attendance.
Yvette Taminiau is a Dutch artist, as well as an assistant professor and senior lecturer at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In her work, she balances and mixes her grounding in both worlds. Taminiau obtained her PhD in Business Administration at the Rotterdam School of Management. She has been a visiting scholar at the Alberta School of Business, Edmonton, and the London School of Economics, London; and has held a British Council Fellowship at PREST, Centre for Science and Technology, Policy and Management Research, at Manchester Business School.
As a university student, to generate extra income and overcome a certain level of shyness, she worked cafés and terraces in the center of Amsterdam as a “papergirl,” hawking copies of NRC Handelsblad to patrons. Since 2004, she has
been painting on newspapers—first on the French Le Monde, later mainly on the Dutch NRC Handelsblad, with an occasional International Herald Tribune and The New York Times.
Her academic background, with its strong reliance on analytical frameworks, is reflected in her selection of topics and articles from the newspapers she works with, for example: Follow the Money, Working Hard, and The Double Life of a Barrel. Before applying her brushes, pens, and sometimes scissors, she carefully reads each newspaper. However, in contrast to her academic work, her approach to her artwork is more free, suggestive, and spontaneous. She transforms newspaper pages in an associative manner, responding to the images, headlines, articles, and the layout of the page.
Going full circle, Taminiau’s first publication of her painted newspapers appeared in 2005 on the cover of the culture section of NRC Handelsblad itself. Since then, she has presented her work at the Athenaeum Nieuwscentrum, part of Athenaeum Booksellers, in Amsterdam, and she created a new series for an exhibition at the Center for Visual Arts in Emmen, the Netherlands. Her works have been commissioned by Birgit Donker, former editor-in-chief of NRC Handelsblad, former director of the Mondriaan Fund, and current director of the Netherlands Photo Museum in Rotterdam. Altogether, her work is held in more than 30 private collections.