Press release Vera Gulikers | No Matter the Weather
Let Vera Gulikers’ work lead you
It immediately becomes clear: Vera Gulikers’ work plays with making a first impression. Both the sculptures and the paintings are large. They use colours that recall candy shops and young girls’ bedrooms: pastel green, yellow, and pink. The sculptures are imposing and cheerfully coloured, exuberant and playful. The first impression is disconcerting, all those large surfaces with sweet colours and confusing grids, the quirky, squiggly lines. That first impression is a kind of test, a challenge. You’re asked to dance, but you don't know the steps yet. It’s best to let your dance partner lead you. If you accept and move with the flow, you gain access to an intelligent and sometimes puzzling world. Vera Gulikers cheerfully bangs her fist on the table and after that, her rules of the game are the only ones that count.
Vera says that she draws energy from resisting her sweet colours and cartoonish lines, her playful, humorous sculptures. Her method relies on the resolute over-affirmation of visual clichés that we associate with girlishness, child-like energy, and advertising. Still, they are taken to such extremes that you simply laugh and realise how liberating it feels to get your eyes and brain past those preconceptions. In the realm of the absurd, opposites become intertwined. Just as in her sculpture: the classic female beauty ideal of long slender legs is magnified to the point of creating a festive but unusable tangle of elastic tubes.
This art does not emerge from a conceptual design, but from an open creative process, the curious and intuitive study of what hands, eyes, and materials can produce. We also see how much knowledge, skill, concentration, and care are reflected in the sculptures. There is much food for thought, some provided by her use of the motifs and images from the oeuvres of famous or forgotten female artists from history. The brushstrokes and nuances of colour and texture are interspersed with relief ink-printing techniques and the velvety surfaces created when microfibres are fixed in glue (flock). For Vera, painting is a time travel machine — you can be in touch with the Middle Ages and video games at the same time. It affirms the present, while sometimes transcending time.
Vera Gulikers shows us how to reflect on our lives and the world, on the personal and social dimensions of women’s oppression as well as on the value of conscious observation and concentration in the face of an accelerating and fragmenting culture. Not by leaning on text and concepts, ideologies, and opinions, but by following your eyes, your hands, your materials, and your intuition. By thinking critically in images. By allowing chance and pleasure and, above all, celebrating your spirit and inventiveness. This is life-affirming art, smelling of freedom, not turning a blind eye to seriousness, melancholy, passion, and sadness, but wanting to take you along with its wisdom and pride in its urge to play, discover, laugh, and dance. Say yes.
Text: Dirk van Weelden 2022