Rob Voerman. Entropic Empire

The Dutch artist Rob Voerman’s (Deventer, NL, 1966–Arnhem, NL) works are spectacularly somber and aesthetic architectures. The scenes he chooses are often famous examples of modernist architecture. Shrouded in decay, they loom like reminiscences of past social promises that were never made good on.

Voerman’s buildings suggest that the effort to return to the Garden of Eden was in vain, that science and technology have not succeeded in pressing nature into humanity’s service. A world has gone to its demise and rises again from the ashes. Humanity is still around, yet something new has come into being in this visually concrete age of posthumanism. Biomorphic structures have sprung up in the urban fabric’s ruins, recalling enormous bizarre tumors that have broken through to the surface and now enmesh the cities in their rampant growth. Man-made buildings flank them, low-slung shoddy structures that cower in their shadows as though seeking shelter next to a new supreme authority. A new consciousness has taken control; humans are reduced to the status of tinkerers recycling for their dwellings what remains. Voerman lays out visions of an alternative (or future) world of terrifying beauty.

A publication will be released in conjunction with the exhibition.