Archive - Evi Vingerling

In the Willem Kolff Hall, the warm blue reception room of the renovated wing of the Trippenhuis, a gold-colored drawing adorns the ceiling. Scratchy, purposeful lines create a faintly coherent image that the imagination continually transforms. Rough drawings of shapes, electrical beams, or symbols. These lines were taken from the cracks in a mountainside near Pisa.

While contemplating the creation of a work for a scientific institute, I was struck by the idea that art and science are born from the same source. The primal human gift of sensing coherence in what they see leads scientists to theories they can test, and artists to catalyze or distill an idea in an abstract or poetic way.

In the drawing on this mountainside, ideas of form and scale were manifested as something resembling signs in a foreign language, scrawled across a gigantic facade. As old as the universe, with shadow lines formed by the way the golden sunshine played across the cracks and grooves in the mountainside’s rocks.

Commission of 4 large-scale ceiling paintings, Trippenhuis Royal Academy of Sciences, Amsterdam, NL, 2019