Emerging throughout Renaissance Europe as conspicuous displays of wealth and knowledge, wunderkammers, or cabinets of curiosities, contained carefully curated collections of oddities, natural items, and distinctive for the time examples of material culture. The preserve of highly educated rulers, aristocrats, members of the clergy, and academic scholars, these encyclopedic collections of religious relics and antiquities were often housed in lavishly decorated, holistically themed settings.
As time progressed and the spatial scale was greatly reduced, the act of hoarding in question moved from rooms to furniture: intricately compartmentalized cupboards.
Returning to this age-old paradigm also playing this turn is the erudite Belgian artist Katrien Van Der Schueren. Rendered in its idiosyncratic, hand-carved fragments, the new series of The Ark of Us murals transforms the traditionally elite and ostentatious wunderkammer practice into a more widespread and subtly personal one.
Although undeniably maximalist in aesthetic and form, these puzzle-like reliefs conceal secret chambers, ideally suited to hold anything meaningful one wishes to store away for safekeeping. The sum of many parts, a single mural can conceptually become a portrait, composed of held objects that each represent a different lived experience.
Featured in former fashion entrepreneur Lisa Perry’s concept home gallery, Onna Housein East Hampton, intricately decorated panels—both architectural and fused—capture the stark white, modernist interior. They are impressively articulated by the natural light that floods in from the floor-to-ceiling windows and large skylights.
The artist presented her first Ark at pad Paris with the Jag gallery. The body of work available at Onna house is the first and only collection of the Ark of Us series in the United States.
Van Der Schueren creates these unified fossil-like compositions with a natural cohesion of natural wood, stone, metal, plaster, resin and pigment. Pushing the conventional boundaries of the craft techniques involved, he creates intricately detailed topographies — worlds unto themselves.
To learn more about this and other programs, visit onnahouse.com.
Photo by Rodrigo Rize.
