Gerrit Offringa

For Gerrit Offringa, space and the plane were two different worlds, each of which calls out to be approached in its own way. In his sculptures, the human body is often dissected in brutal fashion, as if anatomical research is being carried out - cleaving, a cross-section, vivisection, an autopsy. The viewer is allowed a glimpse into the body, which is repeatedly brought into view by simple means. The structure of the vertebrae is sketched out with small pieces of wood. Torsos are cut through with sheets of transparent perspex. The body's cavities are literally ripped open, as though a surgeon has been at work.

Gerrit Offringa's figures often stand apart, alone in the world, like a solitary being who represents all those with whom he has something in common. In this sense, his work is somewhat allegorical. It is the story of Everyman, of each one of us, of you and me, and at the same time of no one. They resemble lonely images in an imaginary museum. Solitude is hard for them in this naked existence in the vale of tears, lacking protecting arms for relief; neither in life nor in death.

This is the ultimate solitude of knowing the inevitability of dying, unprepared, whether in humiliation or not, each completely in his own way. Over and over again, a universal tale is told anew, about man being a burden to himself while often a wolf to his fellow man. Sometimes the subject is resigned, like Job sitting on his dung heap, doubting the existence of a God bent on evil. Man, born naked and going naked to the grave, half angel and half beast, tormented by a hybrid self-image, that constantly oscillates between an organism blessed with eternity and a material construct that will return to the earth. Sometimes the person depicted is merely a skeleton of wire and bone, as vulnerable as Pascal's thinking reed. Then again, the human body is the resonating chamber of the viola da gamba, completely in harmony with the music of eternal beauty. For this sculptor, no material is too flimsy and nothing is simply discarded.

Gerrit Offringa carved his arrows from the same timber we are all carved from. But over and over again, man appears as a lonely tight-rope walker, balancing precariously between heaven and hell. Homo solus aut deus aut daemon - a solitary person is either god or the devil. Offringa's image of mankind swings between the extremes, between black and white, night and day, love and death, Eros and Thanatos, matter and anti-matter, paradiso and inferno, as if there are no such things as purgatorio and salvation, only a dichotomy on a knife-edge. The solitary form of the figure sometimes seems to conjure up a feeling of homesickness. There is a preference for the foetal position, the embryo curling up protectively, a posture that often returns at the moment of death. These are images caught in the in-between, apparently outside time, which nevertheless slips away like a shadow on a sundial.