Andrew Hazewinkel current exhibition

The exhibition I sense your presence and it is a beautiful feeling draws together six conceptually cohesive, materially diverse, recent bodies of photographic and sculptural work that demonstrate Hazewinkel's enduring interests in the entangled relations between the contemporary social afterlife of ancient material culture, the body, individual and collective embodied memory and the materiality of place.

In creating the works for the exhibition Hazewinkel has blended an expanded field of lens-based practices and sculptural processes with museum collection investigations and photographic archive engagements. The exhibition reveals a research-rich practice characterised by confident engagement with diverse methodologies and materialities through which Hazewinkel strives to create works that speak directly to our bodies. Combining a highly refined aesthetic with a personal visual language of rupture, he creates and configures objects and images with visceral corporeal intensity, reminding us that deep time and ancient pasts are alive and active in all of us. In doing so he returns again and again to the human figure.

Comprising more than eighty individual works, the exhibition includes a black and white photographic installation, ten metres in length, titled Ghost Sensations / Machine Dreams. It represents spectral renderings of deserted archaeological sites in the centre of contemporary Athens captured on film by Hazewinkel in the hours before dawn during the period of the 2021 Covid 19 related curfews. The exhibition also includes a small suite of intimately scaled folded brass low-relief sculptures in which classical European ideations and idealisations of the body fold in on themselves; large shimmering gold and aluminium leaf ‘blended portraits’ on sandpaper that meld visual details of broken statues in museums with contemporary visual details that Hazewinkel anonymously harvests from other museum visitors. Time travels through the body is a suite of nine richly coloured photographs printed from found, vintage, black and white negatives that represent ancient sculpture. Hazewinkel refers to these scratched and worn negatives as ‘damaged artefacts of modernity that cradle images of damaged artefacts of antiquity’ which points toward what he describes as an ongoing oscillation between damage and care which functions as a kind of engine throughout the exhibition. These scratched images, which radiate with a gem like colour, are presented with the screen slick qualities afforded by the Diasec process alongside a series of small materially textural reclining human figures cast in lead.  These small figures which appear simultaneously contemporary and ancient carry with them (as we do) vestiges and residues of their place of origin. To create this ongoing series of lead figures Hazewinkel works directly in the landscape with the sand casting process. At low tide on beaches which hold personal significance to the artist he presses a ceramic positive into the wet sands creating unique one-pour moulds into which he pours liquid lead that he has melted in situ on a camping stove. Sometimes these figures are made from fishing sinkers, other times with shotgun pellets, as the molten lead cools shell fragments and other local geological material is captured in the cast figure, where it remains in perpetuity as an integral part of the figure. Another ongoing body of sculptural work included in the exhibition currently comprises more than thirty individual figurative sculptures created from varying types of clay, lead, and bronze. They are are collectively titled Psychopomps which in both the ancient greek language and contemporary english language refer to the spirit entities that without judgement, guide the recently departed to the place of the dead. Hazewinkel's Psychopomps seem equally divine and mortal, embodying a spark of the supernatural and the rumble of the human.

In the artists own words ‘to sense is to apprehend the ineffable, to feel is to allow that sense to flood the body’.