POP unites eight Rotterdam-based artists, whose practices inhabit the open boundary between art and design. Working across drawing, sculpture, painting, light installation, and architectural sculptural objects, they share an awareness of the grammar of form, understanding how a line, a surface, or a volume can convey the essence of an artwork. 

 

Design is a purpose-driven discipline that shapes matter for the function. This exhibition inverts that principle. In POP, that purpose is set aside and is not in focus. The main goal is to achieve art itself through a design approach, a way of working, and ultimately a mode of thinking. Rather than rejecting design, POP recontextualizes it. 

 

The exhibition suggests that design’s vocabulary, proportion, repetition, and balance can be reimagined as a space of sensitivity and inquiry. In doing so, the artists reveal a poetics within the purified and industrial form. They draw from design’s formal intelligence, its precision, high polish, rhythm, and structural integrity, while liberating those qualities from the obligation to serve a purpose. The form is allowed to become affective, rather than effective.

 

Design is a path, and art is the destination. In this way, POP becomes a study in perception, emphasizing the abstraction of objects and the language of material, shape, texture, color, and light.

​

​

 

List of participating artists:

Sven Jansse

Joep Brouwer

Barbara Helmer

Douwe Halbertsma

Merijn Haenen

Gerard Lukken

Sina Steiner

Iwan Pol

​

​

 

Art direction: 

Vladimir Radujkov

 

 

Counterbodies were made possible by:

Gemeente Rotterdam, Gebiedskomissie Kralingen Crooswijk

​

 

Huge thank you to our partners:

De Achtertuin 

 

 

Special thanks to:

Melanie Tissen

 

 

Photo credits:

Jan Arsenovic

​