Pieter Laurens Mol(Brussels)
Artist
In April 2024, LL’Editions published Leporello N° 09 by Pieter Laurens Mol.
Pieter Laurens Mol’s (Breda, NL, 1946) work manifests great conceptual complexity and holds multiple layers of perception, interpretation and meaning. Mol does not favour a single style or medium. The artist often compares himself to an alchemist whose mysterious practices evolve into emotionally charged and visually stimulating experiments. In fact, his diverse oeuvre encompasses and frequently combines photography, film, painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation. Mol’s creative universe is characterized by his fascination with the relativity of time, exploration of manipulating space and scale, intense interest in the past, sensitivity to the importance of chance and accident in the artistic process, and inventiveness within limited visual parameters. A special emphasis on Dutch heritage is another dominant feature. Mol’s work is characterized by a sense of poetry and a fair measure of melancholy. While the artist never forgets to put things into perspective, Mol also engages in an intense battle against pride and failure, often addressing these themes with humor.
Pieter Laurens Mol’s works are often the product of unorthodox combinations of materials, but the use of the photographic medium has remained a constant over the years. In 1981, the Kunsthalle Basel organized his first solo exhibition to consist exclusively of photographic pieces, which then travelled to Stuttgart and Birmingham.
In 1993, the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, organized a retrospective and supervised a traveling exhibition to Valencia and several museums in the USA. The monograph Grand Promptness was published on the occasion of his 1996 exhibition at MoMA, New York. Mol was a tutor at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, the fine arts academy in Amsterdam, from 1989 until 1994. The artist has lived and worked in Brussels since 2005.
“Mol’s work occupies the liminal space between the mundane and the spiritual, reaching for the heavens while standing with two feet firmly on the ground. His work, linked to the physical process of alchemy and the mental state of melancholy, contains specific materials like lead, gold, silver, and sulfur, indicating meaning that can be traced back to Renaissance symbols of death, knowledge, virginity, and evil. Mol, initially schooled as a carpenter before going to art academy, identifies with artworks that use flying as a metaphor for striving for the highest only to face a hard return to earth—from Pieter Bruegel’s falling Icarus to Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void. However, because his references never come across as dull literal citations but rather retain a personal visual language, he maintains a fine balance between the cerebral, the intimate, and the playful. His drawings especially are a case in point, as they are carefully studied but nevertheless amazingly freely executed. Linking Conceptualism to a distinct material form, Mol successfully contains a poetic narrative within his work.”
(Excerpt from an article on Artforum by Robert-Jan Muller.)
In April 2024, LL’Editions published Leporello N° 09 by Pieter Laurens Mol.
