BLACK GRASS / LOVE LETTERS
Fleur van Dodewaard
$27.06 (+tax)
Release for mid-September. open for reservation.
We are releasing the newest art book, BLACK GRASS / LOVE LETTERS, showcasing a collection of drawings by Fleur van Dodewaard, a Dutch conceptual artist.
Van Dodewaard’s practice has been working with a wide range of media, including drawing, sculpture, photography, pottery, and painting. The latest artwork originated during Van Dodewaard’s residency at VAGUE ARLES, where she developed a year-long practice of daily drawing — simple, intentional gestures rendered in pencil and ink. The artist refers to these works as ‘love letters’: visual notes composed across time and place. Immersed in the Provençal landscape and the lingering presence of Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), she engaged with his letters to his brother Theo and studied the landscapes he painted and drew in Arles between 1888 and 1889. Her distinctive visual language also reflects an ongoing dialogue with Japanese art, particularly the abstract ink paintings of Toko Shinoda (1913–2021).
The saddle-stitched booklet accompanying the book contains a text written by the artist herself, an essay by Benno Tempel from Kröller-Müller Museum, and exhibition images from VAGUE KOBE. The publication was elegantly designed by the Netherlands-based designer, Akiko Wakabayashi.
I take a sheet of paper and a pencil and draw a simple shape with one line: this is the playing field. It is the world, it is me, it is the artwork. It is both a tangible and a dizzying metaphysical space of possibilities. I am in the centre. I feel at home here. We start from zero. That zero full of potential, the empty zero. That zero that is always the same and always new. The earth has turned a little in the universe and we wake up in the morning. And then what? We stand with two feet on the ground and we breathe. In and out. In and out. Everything around us continues to run at full speed. – Right there, in the eye of the storm, is where it happens.
Fleur van Dodewaard (from the text in this book）
Exhibition
Fleur van Dodewaard Exhibition “BLACK GRASS / LOVE LETTERS”
September 5 – October 20, 2025
Book launch
On September 9, 2025 from 5:00 pm-7:00 pm
Fleur van Dodewaard《BLACK GRASS / LOVE LETTERS》
Size: 272 x 240 mm / Coptic Binding 80P + Saddle Stitch 16P
Design: Akiko Wakabayashi
Text: Fleur van Dodewaard, Benno Tempel
Language: Japanese / English
Price: 4,000 yen
Publisher: torch press
ISBN: 978-4-907562-56-4 C0071
Year: 2025
Fleur van Dodewaard
Born in 1983, The Netherlands. Van Dodewaard is a Dutch artist based in Amsterdam. She generally operates within a triangle of photography, sculpture and painting. Through the exploration of these media she finds new ways of working with art-historical forms and thereby challenges the ‘art object’ and the way we look at things. Fleur van Dodewaard’s solo exhibitions include ‘BISCUITS’ and ‘SOLO’, Van der Mieden Gallery Antwerp and Brussels, Belgium and Gallery Vitrine, Kyoto, Japan; ‘131 VARIATIONS’ at a.o. FOAM Amsterdam, The Netherlands and POST gallery Tokyo. And ‘A NUMBER OF ANGLES’ at MACRO Museum of contemporary Art, Rome, Italy. In 2021, published left hand right hand (torch press).
