Inspired by Dada artist Jean Arp, Anne Holtrop began the design process for this temporary space with a series of spatial sketches through which he intended to ‘discover form’.
Temporary Museum (Lake) is a curvaceous form set at the end of a meandering path in a nature reserve north west of Amsterdam. Like the ephemeral transitions of the autumnal season it inhabits, the gallery, which opened on mid august 2010, had a lifespan of only six weeks.
Inspired by the automatic drawings of Dadaist Jean Arp - in which the hand is allowed to move instinctively across the paper - Anne Holtrop began the work with sketches through which he intended to use chance in a way to ‘discover form’. This led to a fluid organic outline that ‘hints at the idea of a landscape element - the lake - but is not taken literally’. The resulting shape generated a plan form, which was extruded upwards to create a single-storey enclosure, open to the elements in parts. The structure uses a simple construction sheathed in untreated laminated poplar.
The Temporary Museum houses single works from four artists - Renie Spoelstra, Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky, Driessen & Verstappen and Sjoerd Buisman - who variously interpreted the landscape theme. The huge charcoal drawing by Spoelstra, for example, is specifically connected to the structure and surroundings; the artwork’s size mirrors the opening opposite it, while its content is an image of the scene viewed outside.
Three further openings establish a relationship between inside and outside, framing the artificial fabric-like folds of timber or the gentler rendering of nature itself. Described by Holtrop as an ‘abstract nature’, the design is halfway between building and model. ‘there is never a point in which you can consider the form in its entirety, either inside or out,’ says Holtrop, ‘so the experience of the building is always relational, and not the experience of an absolute whole.’
The drawings that were used to make the Temporary Museum (Lake) were made by chance. Not likeness or beauty is its key aspect, as in traditionalism; nor logic or ratio as in modernism; but rather 'the possible' in the sense of what is merely conceivable, the idea that all things can be perceived and conceived differently. Chance struck me as a way of making work that does not reference to anything specific. But the mind of the viewer, like my mind, wishes to see things in them, like in a Rorschach inkblot. Jumping between different visions the mind projects its own ideas on it. Each construction, each gesture is a new reality. So is the use of one of these drawings to make the temporary museum.
