Hendrik Kolenberg: Shaped by light

Look upwards in an open field and your view drifts quickly free, from bush to track, to open collision with the vast, concave sky. Look upwards in a city and any path to sky is mediated by the facades of buildings, by house fronts or apartment blocks, capped off by those last perches for eyes: rooftops. Above our heads, ever bared to the sky, the roofscape is the major subject of Hendrik Kolenberg’s latest solo exhibition Shaped by Light.

An abstractionist on foot, or a “shape man” by his own telling, Kolenberg finds his subjects over the course of repeated walks through a city’s centre, its outskirts and suburbs. There he seeks those forms, born of the interplay of light and urban object, which are capable of staying. This exhibition takes us through the streets of Rotterdam, the city of his birth, and Sydney, where he lives; these two cities are closest to him, yet are here seen through an eye ever drawn to those places left to the edge of gaze.

The roof-dwellers in works like Double-deckker, Rotterdam and Roof sculpture, Eastwood are unlikely to have been installed with artistic contemplation in mind. The rooftop of an inner-city building is a place where the demands of function have full reign, and, therefore, where things are apt to spring to life. The chimneys of a suburban dwelling have a more public facing existence. We might glance over them for a second or two, contributing as they do to the full exterior view. Yet chimneys remain primarily functional, and sit awkwardly against the easy anthropomorphism of two windows and a door – a house face.

Pencil grid markings still legible under layers of gritty gesso suggest Kolenberg’s affinity lies less with buildings than with the process of building itself. With building as the capture of forms. In Rebuild, city center, Rotterdam these grid lines undergird a scaffolding which all but occludes the nascent tower it encloses. The title alludes to Rotterdam’s perpetual project of rebuilding, continuing since the near complete levelling of its historic city centre in under fifteen minutes during the Rotterdam Blitz of May 1940. The tower stands again, suggesting a rebuilding which might continue forever skywards. That shaping might always lead on to reshaping. For the shapes sustained by light are fleeting things, and much sooner than nightfall are gone. How curious then is this character of their staying power, their constant return, now in paint, ink and charcoal.

“Sunlight and its shadows have shaped my work over almost 50 years, as have common urban realities that are often overlooked or even despised. The paraphernalia of rooftops, back streets and industrial harbours are  brought to life, intensified for me in the light of day, every day. The city of my birth (Rotterdam) and Sydney where I live, provide me with all I could ever want as subject matter for drawings, paintings and woodcuts.”

— Hendrik Kolenberg