’23 Houses Dead Windows’ – Gallery Weerdruk, Amsterdam

Collage books, photos and sculptures

12/10 to 27/10/2024

‘Home’ , ‘Not Home’ , ‘Abandoned/Broken House’ or ‘Being Somewhere’ – these themes run like a common thread through the work of visual artist Orna Wertman. In this multi-disciplinary exhibition she shows unique artist books, objects and a photo series.Special attention is paid to Wertman’s version of the book ‘House‘. In 2021 she founda book by the internationally known conceptual artist Les Levine in the library of Constant Nieuwenhuys. The book was published in Amsterdam in 1971. 50 years later, she has taken up Les Levine’s call to add a follow-up work of art. The result is a unique collage book,a new work of art.

23 Houses Dead Windows are 23 images of house constructions: without windows, boarded up, decorated with tower bells. There will be a series of photos of her abandoned parental home (before demolition) and photos of her footprints over the past 10 years.Since 1982, in addition to her autonomous art, Orna Wertman has self-published eleven photo books (edition 255), each with a special edition (www.ornawertman.info).She made her first unique art book ‘On a Journey with Dr. L. van Egeraat’ in 1995. This was followed by: ‘Climbing with a Red Cord’ (2018), ‘House’ (2021), ‘Flying Fish’ (2021), ‘Sicily and Amsterdam houses’, Collage and assembly book box (2021/2023), ‘Special Houses: Plenty of Space’ (2024).

Michiel Nijhoff wrote for this exhibition:

‘…In her earlier artist books, Orna showed that she doesn’t care about the ugly a-romantic reality. She chooses the details that please her and to her heart’s content she makes water from land, land from air, from below above is the reflection a canal suddenly becomes a real cloud formation, and she thus constructs images with their own reality. One of her books is called ‘Broken Landscapes’ and in it landscapes may be broken, but the fragments forma much more intriguing whole. The Dutch straightforwardness is thus broken by injecting the terribly narrow-minded with a worldly beauty. Beauty that is everywhere, if you just look carefully.’