TOWARD HYDE PARK

This show is a selection of recent works, not an installation. All are part of a larger project, a thematic installation entitled HYDE PARK, which will open at Witte de With in October 1995. There are many thematic connections among the works shown here, but those relationships will only be fully articulated when they are installed with additional works in the larger exhibition. In the meantime, these works stand on their own, in largely the same order in which they were completed.

Hyde Park is a village on the Hudson River, 150 km north of New York City. Dutch farmers settled there in the seventeenth century, though the village seen in the yellow photograph was established in the nineteenth. As may be seen on the map, the region retains many Dutch place-names, and some Dutch farmhouses also remain. There is no formal park in the village of Hyde Park; however, the large riverfront houses are set in naturally occurring forest and park-like grounds.

Witte de With’s exhibition HYDE PARK resembles a roman on the subject of mimesis, with two principal figures: Elie Nadelman (Polish-born American sculptor, 1882–1946) and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In the 1940s, Nadelman created several hundred small figurines derived equally from ancient sources (see photograph from his library) and from contemporary images clipped from newspapers and magazines. The works that comprise HYDE PARK revolve around two bodies of work: the final, most complex, and most mimetic pieces by Nadelman, and the Netherlandish stone farmhouses that Roosevelt built for his own residence and for the first Presidential Library at Hyde Park.

The exhibition HYDE PARK is conceived as a park-like meeting place of these two authors. I am producing works that refer to Nadelman, works that refer to Roosevelt, and works that—for the particular purpose of the roman—refer to both simultaneously.

Brussels, 26 January 1995
Brandt Junceau