Gijs Frieling and Job Wouters to Create a Calligraphic Installation in Moscow

The two Dutch artists are coming to Moscow to cover a one-hundred-metre wall specially erected within the framework of the Holland Days festival with a quote from Maksim Gorky thickly interspersed with sturgeons.

Gijs Frieling and Job Wouters started their collaboration in 2008 and now they are planning to launch a huge installation in Gorky Park in the context of the Holland-Russia Year. As is their custom, the installation will be temporary, for what they truly cherish is the process itself. Gijs is a well-known artist and respectable citizen, Counselor of Holland’s Chief Architect. For him visiting Russia is no novelty for he used the imagery of Slavonic iconography in his works, took a train from Moscow to Vladivostok and expressed his deep interest in Tsereteli’s monument to Peter the Great.

Gijs Frieling

“When we were preparing for our work in Gorky Park, Job came across two peculiar quotes by Maksim Gorky: “Thanks for having been born” and “The more you live the better”. I cannot think of how the guy had come up with them, but I wish some day I could meet the one person to tell her, “thanks for having been born.” At first, we thought they were enough, but then we decided to put them in the centre of the composition and surround them with yet another quote: “Only our havens remain ever faithful to us” by Jan Jacob Slauerhoff, a famous Dutch poet and splash the saturated brownish background with a bucket full of sturgeons. There is no special message attached to the sturgeons, no way, God forbid! It’s not our style. We just paint the sturgeons because they are beautiful creatures, that’s all. Goethe once said that every idea or theory as compared to perception is nonsense. You have to find the meaning by pure contemplation of the art. And I totally agree with that. Hence, when I see a fish, I don’t see any Signs or Symbols but a mirror.”

How did Gijs and Job find a common language? The answer is simple: the former is an expert on large-scale images full of ornamentation, folklore, organic geometry, plants, animals, and weird imagery inspired by Russian iconography; the latter is a calligrapher poring over lettering and graphics. The essence of their collaboration is blending word and image and they are good at it despite the fifteen-year age difference. While Frieling was delivering exhibit after exhibit to Dutch museums, Wouters was drawing party billboard announcements. However, their love for the handwritten ornament bent their artistic vectors in the same direction.