Nelleke Cloosterman 'Dawn goes down to day': PLUS-ONE GALLERY (SOUTH)

Playing with chance through a book of poetry for each day of the year, Cloosterman picked a poem that was to give title to her exhibition, choosing only the date which she (wrongfully) thought to be the opening of her debut solo at PLUS-ONE gallery. ‘Dawn goes down to day,’ a verse from Robert Frost’s ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay,’ came to be providential. It reflects the artist’s considerations on the impermanence of things and the transience of life, which in themselves are imbued of a sense of constant transformation. In Cloosterman’s work, the impossibility of freezing time reveals itself not so much in death as part of life, but rather in everyday’s rebirth.

With a series of works developed in London, where the artist has been based for a year now, the exhibition represents a new moment in her practice and life. Holding a special place in this move, the installation ‘Her early leaf’s a flower’, also named after a line in the Frost poem, is the result of the laborious and painful but liberating gesture of cutting out a dozen paintings from earlier stages in her practice in the shapes of local tree leaves (oak, maple, etc.) that she collected during bike rides from home to her studio. As a rite of passage, the artist symbolically lets go of her old self to embrace a new beginning, and at the same time gives her works an afterlife. While the symbolism of rebirth, personal growth and transformation as an act of freedom is recurrently manifest in the artist’s paintings through images of butterflies, for instance, here it emanates through the work’s processual characteristics and its reference to falling leaves – another symbol seen in the canvases that could also be attributed the meaning of peace.

(Excerpt of the exhibition text written by Daniella Géo, 2023)