Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort
25 September 2021 – 9 January 2022
Solo exhibition
Kunsthal KAdE regularly highlights distinctive artistic practices. In the autumn of 2021 it presented two parallel solo exhibitions devoted to the work of Sadik Kwaish Alfraji and Natasja Kensmil: In Search of Lost Baghdad and A Poison Tree. While Kensmil had exhibited in the Netherlands before, no earlier presentation offered a full overview of her practice. Alfraji, active in various international projects, had not had a solo exhibition in the Netherlands since 2010. His expressionistic drawings examine memory, displacement, and his enduring connection with Iraq. Kensmil develops densely layered visual narratives that function as contemporary history paintings, often addressing emotionally charged subjects.
A Poison Tree was the first extensive survey of Kensmil’s work in the Netherlands. Earlier exhibitions had concentrated on individual series, whereas this show brought together works spanning her entire career. Kensmil’s imagery draws on collective history and personal memory, often shaped by antitheses such as power and vulnerability, the earthly and the spiritual, and violence and sacrifice. The exhibition title refers to William Blake’s poem in which suppressed anger takes root and grows into a poisonous tree.
On the upper floor of Kunsthal KAdE, the exhibition included works from the late 1990s to recent series such as Martyrs Mirror, a cycle of silkscreen prints on the martyrdom of Anabaptists, based on the seventeenth-century book by Thieleman van Braght. Another series, Sleeping Beauty, is derived from nineteenth-century post-mortem child portrait photography, which Kensmil reimagines with restrained serenity. Reflecting on these works, she has stated:
“I believe that the soul lives on in the portraits of the dead. The spirits of the children wander; they try to escape their failed lives and to flee their loneliness. I explore the realm of the living that overlaps with that of the ghosts, the underworld.”
Over more than two decades, Kensmil has developed an oeuvre that treats history as inseparable from the present. Motifs drawn from historical and art-historical sources surface through dense layers of paint. Although the works appear monochrome at first sight, they contain subtle blue-black and green-black tonalities with intricate gradations.
Natasja Kensmil is represented by andriesse ~ eyck gallery. Her work has been included in numerous museum exhibitions in the Netherlands and was the subject of a 2013 retrospective at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin. It featured in Monument of Regents in the Amsterdam Museum wing of the Hermitage Amsterdam, and from 11 September 2021 a new work was shown in the Fries Museum’s Icons exhibition. The exhibition at Kunsthal KAdE was accompanied by a monograph published by Alauda Publications and Kunsthal KAdE.
The exhibitions were curated by Robbert Roos, director of Kunsthal KAdE, and Lara Stolwerk, assistant curator, in collaboration with the artists.
The exhibition was accompanied by the catalog A Poison Tree — Natasja Kensmil, which was awarded The Best Dutch Book Designs 2021. The publication offers a comprehensive overview of Natasja Kensmil’s (b. 1973) work, bringing together paintings and drawings from 1998 to her most recent series. It provides a clear view of the depth and evolution of her practice. The book features texts by Marlene Dumas, Hendrik Folkerts, Robbert Roos, and Wieteke van Zeil, with graphic design by Esther Krop. Link to publisher.