Liselot van der Heijden: Face to Face

March 15 - April 27, 2013

Kent Fine Art is pleased to announce its first show of work by Liselot van der Heijden, Face to Face, in which the artist mines the unexpected power of stillness in two new video installations, one three-channel and the other two. In both pieces, each channel shows an image of a person stopped and still amid the flow of the crowd on a New York sidewalk. This is the second project in which van der Heijden has worked with actors to introduce staged positions into real-world situations. In Face to Face the actors look out and into the lens with a composure that both refutes any self-arrangement into image and resists any projected identification on the part of the viewer. Van der Heijden’s calibrated installation intersects the space of the gallery with acts of looking that emanate both from the work and from viewers moving through the space.

Liselot van der Heijden grew up in The Netherlands and came to New York in 1988 to study at the Cooper Union, where her mentor was Hans Haacke; she went on to earn her MFA from Hunter College. Her first solo exhibition was at Momenta Art in 1996. Since then, van der Heijden has exhibited widely at galleries and institutions throughout the US and Europe, including the Smart Project Space in Amsterdam, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, and the New Museum, Brooklyn Museum, and Exit Art in New York. Her work is the subject of a recent monograph, Liselot van der Heijden: False Metaphors, with essays by Martha Buskirk and Sara Reisman.