The artist's freedom in communicating to the world shared values of universality and respect lies at the
very core of Martha Nieuwenhuijs' work.
She is a truly international artist whose work has the impalpable and ethereal quality of a
quest pursued to the limits of complete exhaustion.
Martha's refined and open mind impresses
on her every gesture a rigorously trained personal trajectory that comes to fruition in a perception
and reflection of reality that is both lucid and totally alien, revealing the poetical significance of her work.
Concerned with opening new places of knowledge through the means of metamorphosis, the characteristic
language of the many experiments undertaken during her career is interdisciplinary and cosmopolitan.
The "transmutation in progress" of her theoretical and practical knowledge is based on both references
to antique wisdom and thoughtful attention to the positive aspects of the contemporary.
The broad choice of techniques evocative of typical renaissance austerity and devotion is instrumental
in metamorphosing her thinking into the realization of the work of art.
No concessions here to facile virtuosity or a search for quick effect.
Through her multiple dialogues with form and content Martha succeeds in forcefully and
lucidly transmitting the experience of creative action.
These dialogues range from
explorations between the inner and the exterior world, the cultures in which she has already or
not yet lived, to the experience of shared art which she carries out with sentient continuity.
Contaminations and artistic exchanges makes for her art to gush free from any mental or academic framework,
in the true spirit of the post-war European art movement COBRA. That is to say, in the awareness that the
growth of both the individual and the collective is premised on participated culture.
This is a key-element
in Martha's work not only because, coming from an avant-garde milieu, she has absorbed this approach to culture
from childhood, but because her personal stylistic mark is rooted in a philosophy of timeless Ovidian transmutation
in which exchange is both opportunity and necessity.
But the encounter with the other does not lead to
the dilution of individuality: it is rather to the contrary the precious raw material of the artist's philosophical
meditations.
Tough devoid of demagogy or provocation, the artist's procedure exposes her bewilderment at humanity's
ambivalent struggle for personal and social ethic.
Between communication and at times heated confrontation
and between multiculturalism and horizons observed from a multiplicity of perspectives, the artist seeks her
own voice in the chorus that entwines the world.
From these premises she has explored and still explores multifarious discursive fields, from textile art,
writing, artist' books, sculptured jewellery, painting, up to improvisations and shared art.
During her journey
along colours, poetry and nature she express the emotions of an art that opens to intimacy and lyrics.
It is an
art that wants to be far removed, as she underscores, from power, and near to the themes of love,
the body and motherhood, celebrated artistic themes which power-engaged art has pushed to the
margins and the shadows since time immemorial.
At the beginning of the seventies Martha premises her engagement with Fiber Art as follows:
" it is an art that is not official, not trendy, that is tied in with the material of women's manual labour
and speaks the language of emotions".
From Fiber Art she retains the allegoric and the experimental
and realizes huge tapestries partly on the loom and partly with mixed techniques but also artist's books
and murals in which text and calligraphy anticipate her most recent work. As if to affirm her support for
a form of artistic expression that the big museums were still largely ignoring, she also embarks
on producing works of larger proportions.
But she also conceives and realizes promotional events
and is the founder, in the nineties, of the Biennal of Fiber Art in Chieri, a medieval town near Turin.
The Biennale is now a major event for artists and Fiber Art lovers from all over the world.When she donates to the
town of Chieri, with its century-long weaving tradition, the first work of Fiber Art, she lays the foundations for
a thematic collection that is now one of the most important in Italy.
Always occupying a place of prominence
in her murals, the crowd and its personae conjure up an atmosphere in which human beings melt into landscapes that
are simultaneously interior and exterior, physical and mental, natural and poetical.
As she engages today with an extraordinarily luminous and refined style of painting, poetry seems
to become part of Martha's mode of expression more than ever before.
In her paintings she converses
with the humans and the animals who are the protagonists of remarkable pictorial series and folders at
times punctuated by a calligraphic sign that shrinks or dilates to become mere texture.
What imprints her recent work is the contrast between the brush stroke and the drawing, an alternation between
lightness and structure that lends autonomy to the figure.
She realizes in this way a pictorial depth in which
chromatic rhythms succeed to architectural spaces.
These are peculiar elements that one finds in works
of Shared Art such as Pas de deux of 2005 realized with Claudio Jaccarino; in La Maja desnuda together with
the Chinese calligraphist Chen Li, a painting on linen made in 2006 and now part of the art collection of
the town of Moncalieri; and in Atelier, mixed technique on fabric and glass fibre lattice, made in Essen
in Germany during a symposium of European artists.
In La sciarpa rossa (the red scarf), a deeply unsettling and at the same time balanced and basic
work to the point of dryness, the artist clearly demonstrates her ability in maintaining her personal
style while adapting it to content. Acrylic on linen, it is a biographical piece that engages with
the artists' feeling of loss upon her father's death. The first part of the painting, in the monochromes
of a world that has exhausted its meaning, shows him next to her; they are both seen from the back looking
into a light that seems to wait for him. In the second part we see him together with his inseparable dog
contemplate with serenity a sunny landscape that is both simple and fantastic and stretches out towards
a hopeful horizon.
The theme of hope runs indeed through the artist's entire work and particularly the most recent one such
as her far from frivolous studies on clothing.
We recognize here the mask that enables us to change our
life by taking on different roles.
And we recognize also animals, to whom the artist assigns messages
of beauty and compassion, extremely important in a narrative that centres on "pietas".
The feathered
ones have a special place in the narrative.
In Pour peindre un oiseau, inspired on a poem by
the French poet Jacques Prévert, the young woman attracts the bird not inside but outside the cage,
hinting hereby at the right of all living creatures to become free.
Her personae, so Parisian, so
sophisticated and ironic, need a special mention.
In Il poeta (the poet), to mention only one,
we see flying over a melancholic-looking crowd a little blue bird of hope.
It seems to intimate that a
bit higher up, there are unexpected, new possibilities. Resting on a thinly drawn line the tiny sparrow
ducks between Prévert's lines: Mais tous les oiseaux ont des ailes, même le vieil oiseau bleu (But all
birds have wings, even the old blue bird).
Everybody can fly then, one only needs to know and the artist
notices and tells the world.
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