Two reasons for writring a blog on Riki Mijling. First reason is i admire her works since i first saw them at the ART AMSTERDAM fair in 2005(?). I . am fond of Concrete and minimal art and in her art i find a twist that fascinates me. Yesterday at the local bookmarket i bought a small artist book by Riki Mijling. Published ia a very small signed and numbered edition of only 20 copies. The reason i noticed it was a ribbed card board cover which was etched by the artist rM ’00. So her innitals and signatue are appearing twice in this very limited edition which is now for sale at www.ftn-books.com
Here follows the biography which can be found on the Riki Mijling site:
Dutch sculptor Riki Mijling (1954, Nijmegen, the Netherlands) works in a rich tradition of non-objective, post-minimalist sculpture. The twentieth century art genealogy shows a forceful line of abstract-geometry, with pioneers such as Kasimir Malevitjs, Vladimir Tatlin, Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg.
Developments in art since the mid-1960s show how artists expanded on this legacy, on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. In the United States artists like Carl Andre, Donald Judd and Robert Morris burst onto the scene, causing a landslide with their minimalist approaches, a radical simplification of forms and dissolving ‘meaning’ in the traditional sense.
And in the Netherlands too, artists sought for new forms of expressiveness, for a formal and linguistic reduction, no-longer connected to representation and story-telling. With her sculpture––and her works on paper too––Mijling expands on this rich tradition of essentialism, developing a characteristic and unique visual language.
Mijling pairs a reductionist approach with a warm, ‘charged’ character of her sculptures in waxed steel, Cor-Ten steel, glass and stone. It distinguishes Mijling from so many contemporaries and admired forerunners, and raises the question whether the concept of ‘minimalism’ is, in Mijling’s case, still applicable.
The non-referential, archetypical forms of Riki Mijling’s sculptures lead back to basic elements, to universal significance of timeless forms. Unmistakably ‘Mijling’ is a quest for an ideal line, for pure form and a new experience of space, of the balance between matter and non-matter.
