Antoon Melissen

This monumental monograph is dedicated to Dutch painter Jaap van den Ende (Delft, 1944). In richly illustrated chapters, four authors illuminate the development of a multiform oeuvre spanning almost six decades. Starting in the 1960s as a purely abstract, 'systematic' painter, figuration reluctantly made its appearance in the mid-1980s. For Van den Ende, however, these, at first glance very different approaches to painting, are not mutually exclusive. Since the late 1990s, abstraction and figuration have coexisted within the same painting. 'I have started to feel more and more, to strive to be fully present,' says Van den Ende. 'I am not someone who exclusively abstract thinking. I want to touch everything.' Text in English and Dutch.

Few artists are so inextricably tied to their native soil as Jan Schoonhoven (1914-1994). In the early 1960s, the born and bred man of Delft achieved international renown with his white reliefs of paper and cardboard, yet he always remained loyal to 'his' Delft. The German photographer Lothar Wolleh (1930-1979) admired Schoonhoven's work and visited Delft for the first time in 1968. Jan Schoonhoven and Lothar Wolleh intended their 1971 artists' book to be a calling card of their artistry. It was a project which often brought the photographer back to Delft. Schoonhoven showed Wolleh how the rhythms of the city recur in drawings and reliefs as 'isolated realities'. Pavement, weathered walls of the alleys of Delft and windows along the canals: Jan Schoonhovens work is abstract and autonomous, but 'breathes' Delft nevertheless. Text in English and Dutch.

The Dutch sculptor Eja Siepman van den Berg (*1943) developed her distinctive visual program in the early 1970s. Her representations of the human body in bronze and stone bear witness to her interest in a harmonious figuration and the principles of abstraction. Siepman van den Berg strives for a clarity of form that omits the merely decorative and superfluous. This also explains her broad interest in early Greek kouroi and in twentieth-century sculptors such as Constantin Brâncu?i and Donald Judd. This richly illustrated publication with the allure of a catalogue raisonné opens up the extensive body of work of one of the Netherlands’ major sculptors.