After a long hiatus, we are very happy to finally show again works by Dutch artist Bas de Wit (*1977, lives in Maastricht). For this exhibition, de Wit has worked with various casts of ancient sculptures as well as those from the Renaissance and Baroque periods, and in turn has taken casts again and modified them: distorted, stretched, compressed, colored. As a result, we see the titular funny memories of... – distorted images of what, since Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the German pioneer of art history, has been described as "noble simplicity, quiet grandeur" and elevated to the perfect standard of all artistic creation. In contrast to this, the reworking of what de Wit commemorates, which sometimes goes into the grotesque, is on the one hand amusing and, on the other hand, thought-provoking: what can happen to us as human beings, what forces are we exposed to?
With his crumpled and deformed references to the historical busts, de Wit takes up earlier, fairy-tallish, mythological figures. Here, too, the depicted bodies did not remain unimpaired; rather, they were combined into quirky narrative structures and situations that were nonetheless essentially devoid of meaning. And in this can be seen a clownish commentary on the world and a reflection on the indeterminacy of life itself. Life, according to de Wit, must be lived, not rationalized.

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