2024 Bas-relief in salvaged wood, #145, 157 x 113 x 11cm Collection Albrecht-Dürer-Haus Museum, Nuremberg, Germany.
Built around 1420, the Dürerhaus was the home of German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer from 1509 to his death in 1528. Nuremberg was an early centre of humanism, science, printing, and mechanical invention. In 1515, Dürer created woodcuts of the first maps of the stars of both hemispheres, and the first perspective drawing of the terrestrial globe. In the late stages of World War 2, from October 1944, Nuremberg was 90% destroyed by Allied bombing and heavy ground combat. The house took significant damage and was brought to the brink of collapse. The bas-relief shows it with various degrees of damage, consolidation attempts and repairs. The Dürerhaus bas relief was finished on May 14th 2024. That day it was 84 years ago the city of Rotterdam was bombed by the Luftwaffe, laying waste to its entire historic centre. As we are witnessing the rise of nationalism, xenophobia and cynical gas-lighting let us hope this will not lead us back to an era of destruction.
The bas relief will become part of the collection of the City of Nuremberg. It will be installed in the Albrecht-Dürer-Haus Museum as part of the new permanent exhibition that will be presented on February 18th 2025.
Part of the Alluvial Plain exhibition at Ron Mandos gallery, Amsterdam in December 2024.
2018 Bas-relief in salvaged wood #119, 210 x 184 x 18cm. Made on commission for Euromast Vastgoed BV, Rotterdam, Netherlands. Private collection Rotterdam, Netherlands.
This work was on display at the Euromast observation tower 2018 through 2020.
2017 Bas-relief in salvaged wood #115, 94 x 234 x 16cm.
De Noord was a windmill on the Oostplein square in Rotterdam that was origianlly built in 1562 and later rebuilt and adapted several times. 14 years after it miraculous survival of the town fire of 1940 the mill caught fire and was demolished. The bas-relief shows the tipical elongated shape of De Noord without the blades and other consctructions, the shape it had after the fire, but with the spectacular commercial signs that the mill had been know for since the early twentieth century. (source: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Noord_(Rotterdam))
Part of the Markers exhibition at Ron Mandos gallery, Amsterdam in 2020.
2017 Bas-relief in salvaged wood #112, 139 x 196 x 14cm. Private collection, Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Industriegebouw Goudsesingel.
Het Industriegebouw is a building in Rotterdam designed by H.A. Maaskant, W. van Tijen and E. Groosman. In typology, function and appearance it became a powerful symbol of the Wederopbouw, the post war rebuilding policy of Rotterdam. The building was completed in 1952 and over the past few years it has been revived as an important cultural hub.
2014 Bas-relief in salvaged wood #101, 410 x 327 x 22cm.
A ‘barn raising’ is a collective action by a community to build a barn for one of its members. Barn raising was particularly common in 18th and 19th century rural North America. The tradition continues in some Amish and Old Order Mennonite communities, particularly in Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and some rural parts of Canada. (source: wikipedia.org/wiki/Barn_raising)
Made for the The factory Set retrospective at the Kunsthal in Rotterdam 2014/15. A total of 37 bas reliefs were shown. Most of them on loan.
2010 Bas-relief in salvaged wood #64, 236 x 84 x 14 cm. Private collection, Old Lyme, Connecticut, United States.
A ‘shotgun shack’ is a narrow home, usually no more than 3.5 m wide, with rooms arranged one behind the other, and doors at each end of the house, a design which assists ventilation. Shotgun houses were popular in the Southern United States from the end of the American Civil War until the late 1920s. Its origins were probably Haitian and African, and the style is most commonly associated with New Orleans; but they can be found as far away as Chicago, Key West and California. As a sign of its New Orleans heritage, the house is usually raised two to three feet off the ground. (source: wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotgun_house)
“Children’s bicycles and Mardi Gras beads remained from a oated away house at Deslonde Street in the Lower Ninth Ward in fog at morning. New Orleans, Louisiana, January 30, 2006” (photo by Alexey Sergeev: asergeev.com)
Part of the Shallow Wade exhibition in 2010 at OkOk gallery, in Seattle, WA, USA.
2009 Bas-relief in salvaged wood #61, 165 x 152 x 18cm. Collection of Ieke Frankenmolen, Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Breaker boys, Woodward Coal Mines, Kingston, PA [ca 1900] photographer unknown. Copyright Detroit Publishing Co. Source: Library of Congress.
Breaker Boy
A breaker boy was a coal-mining worker, especially common in Pennsylvania, whose job was to separate impurities from coal by hand in a coal breaker. Most breaker boys were between 8 and 12 years old. The use of breaker boys began around 1866. For 10 hours a day, six days a week, breaker boys would sit on wooden seats, perched over the chutes and conveyor belts, picking slate and other impurities from the coal. A coal breaker breaks coal into pieces and sorts them into categories of roughly uniform size. Its second function is to remove impurities like rock, slate, sulphur, ash, clay, or soil. This became necessary when coal started being used in factories and iron works. The work of the breaker boys was hazardous. They had to work without gloves to better handle the slick coal, and their fingers were often cut by the sharp slate. Breaker boys could easily lose fingers, amputated by the rapidly moving conveyor belts, or even feet, hands, arms, or legs as they moved among the machinery and were caught under the conveyor belts or in gears. Many were crushed to death, and the supervisors would retrieve their bodies from the machinery only at the end of the working day. Because of the dust, breaker boys sometimes wore lamps on their heads to see, and asthma and black lung disease were common. When the coal was washed to remove impurities it would create sulfuric acid which burned the hands of the breaker boys. By the age of twelve the boys were considered old enough to start work in the mine itself. By then most of them were already hunchbacked like old men. Although the first laws to protect the breaker boys were enacted in 1885, the coal mines continued to employ them. Their numbers finally began to decline in the 1910s due to improvements in technology, stricter child labor laws, and the enactment of compulsory education. Breaker boys were known for their fierce independence and their rejection of adult authority. They often formed and joined trade unions, and precipitated a number of important strikes in the anthracite coal fields of Pennsylvania. Among these were the strike which culminated in the Lattimer Massacre (19 unarmed strikers were shot dead by a posse of the Luzerne County sheriff) and the Coal Strike of 1902. (source: wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaker_boy)
Coal Breaker
Coal breakers were used primarily in the United States, especially at the anthracite coal mines of Pennsylvania. Their main function was to break coal into pieces and grade the lumps into six commercial sizes. Until about 1900, nearly all anthracite coal breakers were labor-intensive. Impurities were removed by hand, usually by young boys. Coal breakers were generally located as close to the anthracite mine entrance as possible, so as to minimize the distance the coal had to travel before processing; but this had its hazards. In the UK, the government enacted a law in the mid-19th century requiring that coal breakers be built away from mine entrances. But in the US, neither the federal government nor the states adopted regulation of coal breakers until after many lives had been lost. Two disasters prompted the adoption of legislation. The first occurred on September 6, 1869, when a small explosion at the Avondale mine in Plymouth, Pennsylvania, blew flames up the mine shaft. The wooden breaker built over the mine opening caught fire and collapsed, trapping and killing 110 workers in the mine below. No action was taken at that time. But in 1871, a fire destroyed the wooden breaker built over a mine opening in West Pittston, Pennsylvania, trapping and killing 24 miners. The state of Pennsylvania finally adopted a law in 1885 requiring that coal breakers be situated at least 200 feet from the opening of any mine. (source: wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_breaker)
2007 Bas-relief in salvaged wood #43, 115 x 85 x 12cm. Collection of ABN-AMRO bank, Netherlands.
The Joint Space Operations Center (JSOC) opened in the McMurdo Antarctic station in January 2005. The building’s purpose is to unite the station’s computer and telephone systems into one dedicated hub. It houses the station’s computer data center and telephone network. NASA uses it to track polar-orbiting scientific satellites and to operate weather satellite equipment for the U.S. Air Force. This type of computer data center generates so much heat that the building needs to be cooled down despite its Arctic location. (source: The Antarctic Sun)
2007 Bas-relief in salvaged wood #42, 150 x 95 x 12cm. Collection of Taco Verplanke, Barendrecht, Netherlands.
This house on the South Georgia Islands saw both the start and end of Ernest Shackletons Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914–17
Whaling station on Grytviken, South Georgia. 1989. Photographer: Hannes Grobe, Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven, Germany.
The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition
By the early twentieth century the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration was rapidly drawing to a close. The American Robert Peary had (disputedly) attained the North Pole on April 6th 1909; Norwegian Roald Amundsen had discovered the South Pole on December 14th 1911. Robert Falcon Scott’s ‘Terra Nova’ Expedition had arrived at the South Pole on 17 January 1912 only to find Amundsen had beaten them to it. Demoralized and in deteriorating condition, they attempted the journey home but lost their way in snowstorms; all of them perished. Undeterred by this tragedy, Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton stated that there remained ‘one great main object of Antarctic journeyings’: the first land crossing of the Antarctic continent. Shackleton set out on his Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition at the dawn of the Great War.
Having secured the funds he needed from the British Government and wealthy backers, he had by June 1914 bought the 300-ton barquentine Polaris which was to take them to Vahsel Bay. The ship, built for the Belgian explorer Adrien de Gerlache, was renamed Endurance after the Shackleton family motto. He also bought the ship Aurora. This second ship, under command of Aeneas Mackintosh, was supposed to meet them at the Ross Sea on the other side of the continent and lay in provisions for the last part of the crossing.
Endurance left Plymouth on August 8th 1914, just four days before the first skirmish of WWI, sailing via Buenos Aires and arriving in South Georgia on November 5th. After a month-long halt at the Grytviken whaling station, Endurance departed for the Antarctic. Soon they encountered pack ice which slowed down their progress and occasionally halted them altogether. On the 22nd the ice abated and they were able to enter deep into the Weddell Sea. On January 15th 1915 bad weather forced the ship to shelter in the lee of a stranded iceberg and the next day they were stopped by the surrounding ice at a position of 76°34 s, 31°30 w. On February 14th, after making little further progress, the men stepped on to the ice with ice-chisels, prickers, saws and picks to break the ship free, but their efforts were in vain and they now had to face the ‘possibility of having to spend a winter in the inhospitable arms of the pack’. Endurance, still caught in the ice, began drifting North with the pack. The ship’s routine was abandoned in expectation of a long stay. The dogs were housed on the ice and the ship’s interior made suitable for winter quarters. Shackleton hoped he could attempt a return to Vahsel Bay next spring, but on April 14th Shackleton observed the nearby pack ‘piling and rafting against the masses of ice’. If this happened near Endurance ‘she would be crushed like an eggshell’. Some signs of the ice disintegrating occurred on July 22nd and a week later a storm caused the ice floe to start breaking up all around the ship. Masses of ice forced under the keel made the ship list heavily to port. ‘The effects of the pressure around us was awe-inspiring. Mighty blocks of ice (…) rose slowly till they jumped like cherry-stones gripped between thumb and finger’. On October 24th 1915, they were forced against a large floe and the ship’s hull began to give way. With loud noises it began to bend and splinter, and water from below the ice poured into the ship. The order to abandon ship was given three days later. Supplies and lifeboats were transferred to the ice. Frank Hurley was able to retrieve his camera and 550 glass plates of which he selected 150 and smashed the rest. On October 30th they started to march west in the hope of reaching Paulet Island but the route over the ice was impossibly rugged. Hauling the heavy supplies and lifeboats on sledges, they had only progressed a few miles in three days when they decided to pitch camp on a large ice shelf. From ‘Ocean Camp’ they could still revisit the wreck of the Endurance until, on November 21st, it finally slipped under the ice. They attempted a second march on December 23rd, but higher temperatures had only made conditions worse, with men sinking to their knees in soft snow as they hauled the boats over the ice ridges. Morale was getting dangerously low. They made only a little over a mile of progress daily, and after seven days Shackleton called a halt: ‘It would take us over three hundred days to reach the land’. They erected ‘Patience Camp’, their home for the next three months. Dwindling food supplies forced them to shift their diet to seal meat and to shoot and eat all but two teams of the dogs. On the evening of April 8th the floe suddenly split and they hastily readied the lifeboats. From then on the water would repeatedly open up and close again, forcing the men to pull the boats onto the ice and wait for conditions to improve. The physical strain and the lack of food were wearing the men down, so Shackleton decided to try for the uninhabited and rarely visited Elephant Island. They reached it on April 14th and managed to find a safe place to land and camp the following day. Their only prospect of rescue was to prepare one of the lifeboats for an 800 mile voyage across the Southern Ocean, back to South Georgia.
The ship’s carpenter McNish set about the task of improvising tools and materials. Shackleton and five other men took to the Ocean on April 24th 1916 in the 6,85 meter lifeboat ‘James Caird’, named after one of the expedition sponsors. Twenty-two men were left behind on Elephant Island with instructions to make for Deception Island the following spring, should Shackleton not return. The voyage to South Georgia hinged on pinpoint accuracy of navigation under the most unfavorable of conditions. Everything was soon encrusted in ice. The boat rode sluggishly and after some days they faced waves which Shackleton described as the largest he had seen in 26 years at sea. But on May 8th they sighted South Georgia. They washed up on the shore at King Haakon Bay on the uninhabited south side of the island. Another sea journey was out of the question, so a hike through the mountainous, uncharted interior of South Georgia seemed the only viable option. After some rest Shackleton, Frank Worsley and Tom Crean set out for Stromness on May 19th. Shackleton wrote afterwards: ‘I have no doubt that Providence guided us … I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers it seemed to me often that we were four, not three’. (T. S. Eliot later borrowed this image for his poem ‘The Waste Land’).
By the evening of May 21st all six of the James Caird party were safe. Ice conditions prevented ships from reaching Elephant Island and it was only at the fourth attempt on August 30th that the Chilean vessel Yelcho was able to save the remaining men. They had survived the winter by improvising a shelter made from the remaining lifeboats, but some were in a bad state. All 28 of Shackleton’s party survived earning him respect and admiration. But this did not apply to the other half of the expedition. On the opposite side of Antarctica, Aeneas Mackintosh had risked everything to lay the depots of supplies for the expedition, unaware of the futility of their efforts. Three of their party perished in the snow.
Shackleton’s group, having been out of touch with civilization since 1914, returned to a world immersed in war. Many of them immediately took up military service and many died or were wounded. Seven years later, Shackleton organized another Antarctic expedition taking him back to South Georgia, where he died of a heart attack on January 5th 1922. It would be fifty more years before the Antarctic continent was first crossed. (source: wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Trans-Antarctic_ Expedition)
Whaling Station Grytviken on South Georgia Islands.
Stove in the makeshift galley [1915] This photo was taken in the Weddell Sea during Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans- Antarctic Expedition of 1914-1916. Photo from glass negative taken in 1915 by Frank Hurley. Copyright: Scott Polar Research Institute.
‘Photograph showing the stove suspended by ropes from spars in the makeshift galley (kitchen). The galley which was erected on the ice was made of sails and spars and battens of wood from the ship. The stove appears to have been made from metal cylinders (ship’s funnel?). Pots and pans and other cooking equipment are on the stove and shelves on the wall behind.’ (source: spri.cam.ac.uk/…/p66.19.x41)
2005 Bas-relief in salvaged wood #27, 205 x 182 x 16cm. Collection Museum Rotterdam, Netherlands.
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Construction of the Euromast bas relief.
Euromast
The Euromast observation tower was designed by Hugh Maaskant and built in 1958-1960 to a height of 101 meters. A further 85 meters were added in 1970 so that it would remain the tallest built structure in Rotterdam. Originally intended for the Floriade event in 1960 in Rotterdam, it has since come to symbolize the spirit of post World War II reconstruction.
2002 Bas-relief in salvaged wood #16, 350 x 210 x 20cm. Built for Hogeschool Rotterdam (Rotterdam University), Netherlands.
Fly Over was the first bas-relief that was made on commission. It was constructed especially for the auditorium of the new Economic Faculty (H.E.S.) in Rotterdam, part of Rotterdam University. The auditorium is a large space with dark grey walls and bright red linoleum floors. The colour of the floors is incorporated in the work as a red haze. The relief itself was based on photo’s of Kleinpolderplein, a large and complex stacked interchange built in Rotterdam from 1958 onwards.
View of Mobility at gallery Delta. Hans Sonnenberg is seen seated at his desk. Fly Over was temporarily installed at the gallery for the occasion of this show..
These works were part of the Mobility exhibition at gallery Delta in 2003:
2002 Bas-relief in salvaged wood #15, 135 x 165 x 14. Collection of Museum Rotterdam, Rotterdam, Netherlands. Photo: Theo van Pinxteren, Museum Rotterdam.
The Parkflat apartment block is situated on the corner of Westzeedijk and Kievitslaan in Rotterdam, overlooking the park. Designed by E.F. Groosman, it was built between 1948 and 1958 as the first large residential building of Rotterdam’s postwar reconstruction period. The Parkflat contains 50 relatively luxurious apartments, even though the tower block was constructed in a modified version of the MUWI concrete panel system. This building system was widely used for mass housing construction all around the Netherlands until it fell out of favour in the early 1970s. (source: rotterdamwoont.nl/…/Parkflat) (source: bestaandewoningbouw.nl/muwi)
