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  • From: 01 october 2016
  • Through: 15 january 2017
  • Location: Museum de Fundatie

David Bade - Slowbade

From 1 October 2016 at Museum de Fundatie in Zwolle, the artist David Bade will present a series of six large paintings on canvas under the title SlowBade. In his studio in Curaçao, Bade has been working on this series, which was commissioned by Ralph Keuning, director of Museum de Fundatie. Keuning challenged Bade to work not at his usual high speed, but slowly and painstakingly. After the paintings arrived in the Netherlands, Bade continued working on them here. For him, this is an exercise in patience, but also an adventure in paint.

David Bade's work is set apart by its multimedia character and process-driven approach. Throughout his work, Bade is emphatically, almost physically, present. In his paintings, his brushwork is subordinate to the speed and dynamism of the process. In commissioning SlowBade, Museum de Fundatie hopes to place the limelight on David Bade as a painter. What happens to Bade's work when speed makes way for a slowdown? When he spends more time on a single subject, how does it change the end result? Will it be an accumulation of motifs, or express a shift towards profundity and silence? In any case, the overseas voyage of the paintings from Curaçao to Bade's studio in the Netherlands has formed an unavoidable pause in the painting process, after which Bade could take a fresh look at his work. In other words, SlowBade is a painterly adventure, in which even the lead actor does not know how the story will end.

David Bade finds inspiration in the world around him. From the everyday welter of impressions and experiences, he filters the things that for some reason fascinate him. These things may be special or unusual, but just as often, most people would consider them trivial. In SlowBade, these impressions will remain the basic ingredients of his art. This time, however, he will serve them differently: not raw and on many different plates, but – as Bade himself puts it – 'boiled, braised, and stewed, in one pot, on one canvas.' In this process, Bade is meeting with more resistance from his subject matter, and that leads him to some decisions he would probably not have made otherwise: 'The paintings are always on my mind, nagging at me. That, too, follows from the decision I made in advance to keep the process going as long as possible. That lends greater importance to the moment when you declare the painting finished. At the same time, there's always the danger of drawing it out too long. It's a delicate balance.'

Museum de Fundatie first came into contact with David Bade four years ago. In 2012, Bade made the twelve-metre-high sculpture Ins Blaue for Museum de Fundatie and Mojo Concerts. It stood at the Lowlands Festival in Biddinghuizen in the summers of 2012, 2013, and 2014. For the rest of the year it was on display in the Museum de Fundatie sculpture garden on the grounds of Nijenhuis Castle in Heino/Wijhe, and in September 2014 that became its permanent location. In May 2014, with the European Parliament election approaching, De Fundatie presented Bade's Europe me, an exhibition reflecting on European identity, in the same location. Last year, an installation by Bade and Tirzo Martha, co-founders of the Instituto Buena Bista in Curaçao, was included in the exhibition Open in De Fundatie's Zwolle location, organized by guest curators Nick & Simon.


  • From: 01 Oct 2016
  • Through: 15 Jan 2017
  • Location: Museum de Fundatie

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