Menu
The New Contemporary Art Magazine

Nightshop’s Recreations of Neighbors in Children’s Clay

Dutch duo Ward van Gemert and Adriaan van der Ploeg, collectively known as Nightshop, began a partnership in 2010. And recently, the pair decided to recreate the heads of people on their street using resin-based children’s clay. The result of this effort is a collection of 30 life-sized, unsettling characters in a series called “The Strangers.” Nightshop is based in Rotterdam, a city in the Netherlands.

Dutch duo Ward van Gemert and Adriaan van der Ploeg, collectively known as Nightshop, began a partnership in 2010. And recently, the pair decided to recreate the heads of people on their street using resin-based children’s clay. The result of this effort is a collection of 30 life-sized, unsettling characters in a series called “The Strangers.” Nightshop is based in Rotterdam, a city in the Netherlands.



Though it may be rude to stare at their real-life counterparts, even if the duo wants to, “The Strangers” offer their own engrossing opportunity. “The result is a family of outcasts and strangers without any kind of filter,” the pair says. “Free to stare at until the cows come home.”



The vibrant original colors translate to fascinating hues on the faces of the characters, resulting in creations that resemble characters in pulp comics. Each head is about a foot tall, and is placed on a coated base. In a statement from the duo, they say they are interested in “mixing elements of high culture and popular culture into their designs. Also, they’re keen on investigating the boundaries between good taste and bad taste.”

Meta
Share
Facebook
Reddit
Pinterest
Email
Related Articles
Los Angeles artist Roberto Benavidez has reimagined characters from Hieronymus Bosch’s work in an likely sculptural form: piñatas. These life-sized versions of figures from Bosch works like “The Garden of Earthly Delights” bring 15-century sensibilities into three-dimensional existence. The work blends both traditional Mexican and European influences.
In Zak Ove’s sculptures, viewers find an artist using modern materials and icons to look back at centuries-old cultures. The mixed-media work moves between the futuristic and ancient in its explorations. His stated charge is to “"to reignite and reinterpret lost culture using new-world materials, whilst paying tribute to both spiritual and artistic African identity."
Korean artist Choi Xooang (whom we previously featured here) creates hyperreal, resin sculptures that shock with their unexpected, violent manipulations of the human body. His latest body of work features couples and doubles grappling with each other's flesh. In one piece, a woman's fist penetrates the back of another's skull while in another, a masked woman is strapped with a male torso like a backpack, carrying the weight of another's mutated and mutilated body. Choi adds eroticism to these graphic visions. The bodies he chooses to manipulate are graceful and model-esque, yet each one contains its own set of disorienting details that provoke our collective anxieties.
John Grade is a Seattle-based artist who creates monumental installations that significantly alter the viewers' experience of architecture and nature. Gritty, industrial materials are Grade's trademark. He likes his work to have weight in an almost precarious sort of way, as if the piece might give and crush the viewer at any second. Inspired by the land art movement of the '60s and '70s, Grade's work echoes the scale and impact of famous Earthworks like Spiral Jetty, though most of his interventions take place inside of museum and gallery environments rather than the land itself.

Subscribe to the Hi-Fructose Mailing List