Nic Hess

König Gerrit, 2007

Gerrit Rietveld’s revolutionary Red-Blue Armchair dating from 1918-23 was made of simple square timber and two timber surfaces, accentuated by the De Stijl color range. The rational design of Rietveld’s original was linked with the Utopian idea that abolishing the divisions between work of art and consumer object enabled us to experience the vision of an ideal design for our environment. Nic Hess used rolls of adhesive tape to extend the chair’s active color range for his sculpture König Gerrit [King Gerrit], and they now grow into the space like snails. Colored adhesive tapes of American provenance form part of the material base for Nic Hess’s drawn installations. He has been taking possession not just of walls and ceilings, but whole rooms intellectually and actually since the late 1990s, using colored pencils, industrial paint, collaged images and colored tapes. Here he is acting more like a graffiti artist who has landed up in art localities than a painter.