CHRISTOPHER PHILLIPS

Mirjam Kuitenbrouwer at Wohnmaschine

When visual artists turn to questions of constructed space, the Dutch have a clear advantage. An awareness of the architectural interior is a feature of the Netherlandish painting heritage that goes back to such predecessors as Vermeer, Saenredam and de Hooch. The work of Miriam Kuitenbrouwer, an Arnhem-based artist, extends this tradition. For the past decade, Kuitenbrouwer has explored domestic interiors in frequently quizzical paintings, collages, photographs, sculptural models and installations. This show reprised several examples of her earlier work and provided a look at her most recent variations on the theme of architectural perception.

In her modestly sized paintings, Kuitenbrouwer often starts with a photograph of a contemporary or historical room which she has culled from publications such as World of Interiors. She enlarges this image as a laser print and then, following the photograph's main outlines, overpaints large sections of it with flat expanses of acrylic in muted tones. The result is a kind of architectural abstraction in which a few surviving photographic details – windows, mirrors or doorways – punctuate the painting‘s otherwise flat surface, sending the viewer's gaze into perspectival vistas that seem never quite to cohere.

At Wohnmaschine, one such work served as the basis for an engaging installation called Instant Extension (2000). Here a roughly 12-by-36-inch abstracted interior painting was accompanied, on the gallery‘s opposite wall, by a floor-to-ceiling, black-and-white photocopy of the same work. Within each image, a depicted rectangular mirror was replaced by actual mirrored glass. This device provided viewers with the disorienting sensation of seeing themselves reflected, jarringly out of scale, within the virtual spaces of the painting and its grisaille copy.

The gallery‘s front room contained three of Kuitenbrouwer‘s new photographs, all created in her own dwelling, and all involving the dizzying play of distorted reflections. Together, the works in this exhibition gave a contemporary spin to the notion that the architectural interior ultimately stands for the artist's own subjectivity. As Kuitenbrouwer puts it in the catalogue of her recent show at the Vienna Secession, “The world is a detour. I am a terminus.”

Art in America, June, 2001