Watch physically
Krijn de Koning, Binnen en buiten het gebouw (1996)
How do you remember the places you see every day, the street you walk through daily, that old church you pass by on your way to work? Do you really remember what you can see there? And how come you remember one detail and not another?
Krijn de Koning builds new spaces or parts of them in existing spaces. In an exhibition space, for instance, there may suddenly be a blue stage, or a building may be traversed by a raised floor. He also lets entire rooms be taken over by maze-like structures. Sometimes they seem to have grown there naturally. De Koning wants to draw our attention to an existing space and surprise us with details on which he focuses our attention with his structures. He calls it ‘looking physically’.
In architecture, the function of a building is often clearly visible and tangible: you instantly know what a particular building is used for, where a staircase is likely to lead, and you know that light comes in through the windows and that a door can be opened and closed. In De Koning’s works, there are none of these things we take for granted. Although the ground plan of his structures is always geometric, the colours bright and bold – mainly yellow, blue and green – and there are no curves, the space is never easy to understand. There is no functionality. There are no chairs, tables or benches. There are no plants anywhere and there is nothing hanging on the walls. Sometimes the roof is missing, windows have no panes, and the doors are only holes in the wall. In Almere, De Koning blurred the boundaries between inside and outside by adding a platform: a red square with a white frame that occupied the required space like a kind of parasite. That way, De Koning stimulated a new experience of the space of the museum. Walking into a work by De Koning means you become aware of the space itself, but also of the surroundings of that space, and above all, or your own perception.
Krijn de Koning, Binnen en buiten het gebouw
Krijn de Koning, b.1963, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Binnen en buiten het gebouw – Schetsontwerp en fotodocumentatie van beeld De Paviljoens, Almere, 1996
crayon, acryl on paper, photograph1
63 cm x 48 cm and 46 cm x 30 cm
purchased in 1996, Museum De Paviljoens
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