The painter Karel Appel invented the term 'image building' before the word even existed. With bold statements like 'I'm just messing about' and 'a tube of paint is like a rocket to me' he succeeded to portray himself as the great inconsiderate painting-beast of last century from as early as the fifties - exactly what the audience was looking for in a painter at the time. Even though it made Appel famous, the consequence was that he was taken less and less serious as a painter, especially by 'connoisseurs', in the decades that followed. In a big overview, Gemeentemuseum The Hague tries to rehabilitate Appel-the-painter, by showing for example, that he did actually think about his compositions and even made painstaking studies for his work. Miraculously enough, it works: 'Karel Appel retrospective' is an extraordinary exhibition with paintings that burst with the energy and pleasure of painting.
Post Internet Art is a trendy, and a tad tragic movement in contemporary art. Of course nobody seems to know exactly what it is, and whoever is associated with it anyhow wants nothing to do with it. Most of the time, post internet art consists of images or installations build with all sorts of objects: partially handmade, partially printed digitally, partially 'readymades' - distinction and hierarchy disappeared, in the same way that you can have many open tabs on your computer screen at once, that are connected to each other in different ways.
And even though the curators explicitly avoid the term, the strong suspicion rises that Inflected Objects #2 Circulations in De Hallen is a typical Post Internet exhibition. Works by the artists Martijn Hendriks, Katja Novitskova, Vanessa Safavi and Dan Walwin, that often consist of many elements, are being shown here in combination with artworks from the collection of the Frans Hals Museum. Title cards seem to be a taboo, whereby the overall installation appears as an abundant Gesamtkunstwerk. That seems confusing for a moment, but if you proceed to look around and associate on the basis of your own personal preferences (like you do when you are browsing the web), Inflected Objects appears to be a rich, if not contagious contemporary exhibition - that leaves you with the feeling of being up-to-date too.
