Tom Claassen - Beelden aan Zee, Scheveningen/The Hague
Sculptor Tom Claassen (1964) searches for the essence of form in his sculptures. By showing the archetypal characteristics of people, animals and objects, he provides just enough tools to recognize the representation. Their often large sizes ensure that you as a viewer cannot miss them. They often have round, soft shapes and are often made of hard materials such as bronze, wood, aluminum, plastic and concrete. Besides being humorous, the images are also often endearing, clumsy and sometimes tragic.
Sculptures by Tom Claassen are located in public spaces everywhere in the Netherlands. Their consistently large formats ensure that as a viewer you literally cannot ignore them. This emphatic presence, which could easily be experienced as megalomaniac, has a relativizing counterpart in the humorous way in which he shapes his subjects. It mainly concerns human and animal figures, highly simplified or even cartoonish, made in various materials such as bronze, wood, rubber, jute, aluminum, plastic and concrete. Besides being funny, many images also have something clumsy and tragic. With their generally limp rag doll-like appearance, it is almost as if they are collapsing under their own weight.
Claassen made more than thirty sculptures for public spaces, including Horse in Utrecht (1996), Elephants along the A6/A27 near Almere (1999-2000) and Two donkeys in Apeldoorn (2011).
6 сен 2024
