“Paying homage to the rich materiality of early 20th century interiors, Tom Postma Design’s concept for Gmurzynska Gallery’s 2019 TEFAF Maastricht booth focuses on the use of sumptuous materials and clean lines. The layering of exhibition space further creates a sophisticated, contemporary atmosphere: an elegant scenography in which the artworks take centre stage. Our team designs from the idea that architecture should never compete with the art; rather, it should complement it. The designs we create express a spatial narrative through which one can enjoy art to the fullest.”
—Tom Postma, February 2019
Galerie Gmurzynska is proud to announce its return to TEFAF Maastricht after 17 years with a survey of works by Modern Masters with a booth design by Tom Postma.
Galerie Gmurzynska’s booth rendering by Tom Postma
The presentation will investigate the 20th Century dialogue with Abstraction through a journey over the leading movements during the decades of artistic research and evolution, spanning from the early 1910s until the 60s.
Pivotal masterpieces from artists of the gallery’s program will be featured in the presentation, starting from Sonia Delaunay’s Zenith, one of the first experiments in integrating typography into art, and a beautiful example of how the artist embraced elements of modernity and current topics in her work almost half a century before Pop Art; the show will extend into Cubism, Surrealism, Art Brut, and Dadaism with works by Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Roberto Matta, Wifredo Lam, Jean Dubuffet, and Kurt Schwitters.
The exploration will continue with a juxtaposition of the works by founder of De Stijl Theo van Doesburg, pioneer Bart Van der Leck, and Fernand Léger.
Bart van der Leck, member of De Stijl, extended his painting work to interior and product design as well as public spaces, and holds a unique position within the history of the Dutch avant-garde evolving at the beginning of the twentieth century. The artist favored a schematic composition, reducing the Volume to the Line, and proposing a flatness that became a key element in Neoplasticism.
Work at the docks, with its prominent interaction between black and white playing with the fore and the background and with the uninterrupted contour lines, bears the suggestion that it might have been conceived as a design for a stained glass composition.
Fernand Léger, modernist who profoundly rooted his art in architecture and modern industrial machinery, profusely used primary colors in his compositions, developing a unique style characterized by monumental mechanical forms rendered in bold colors.
A beautiful example of Léger’s oeuvre is Nature morte au compas, from the Paul Rosenberg collection in New York. In this work, the artist explored his ideas about the relationship between nature and modernity, setting side by side angular, geometric forms with soft, almost natural ones with biomorphic elements, including tools drawn from the modern technical culture.