HAMBURG, Germany — Solely July 9, 1975, the artist Bas Jan Ader, age 33, set sail from Cape Cod, meaning to cross the Atlantic in a 12.6-foot vessel known as Ocean Wave after which mount an exhibition on the Groninger Museum in his native Netherlands.
The journey was, famously, by no means accomplished. The battered boat was discovered off the coast of Eire months later, however there was no hint of the artist past a number of private belongings. This now 50-year-old artwork world tragedy, which started as a part of the artist’s In Search of the Miraculous trilogy (a three-part efficiency, with the transatlantic journey meant because the second half), made Ader into the consummate artist’s artist and the topic of a lot research and dialogue.
A half-century later, this and different works, all produced between the late Fifties and Ader’s premature disappearance, are the topic of I’m Looking …, a uncommon solo exhibition on the Hamburger Kunsthalle. The present is commemorative and complete: Exhibited right here for the primary time are early works on paper from a portfolio lately present in Drieborg, Netherlands. Additionally new is a fabricated model of a neon piece in major colours spelling “Piet Niet” — an homage to, and rejection of, Piet Mondrian, whose concepts Ader intently studied — which beforehand existed solely as a sketch for a deliberate set up. However viewers get the artist’s biggest hits too: his 4 “Fall” movies from the early Seventies and, after all, the poignant “I’m too sad to tell you” (1971), through which an unspeakably fairly, younger Ader — in a good closeup on black and white movie — weeps inconsolably and inexplicably for about three and a half silent minutes.
Nonetheless of Bas Jan Ader’s movie “I’m too sad to tell you” (1971) (picture Kimberly Bradley/Hyperallergic)
Nonetheless of Bas Jan Ader’s movie “I’m too sad to tell you” (1971) (picture Kimberly Bradley/Hyperallergic)
The present unfolds chronologically, and the earliest works are unsurprisingly in conventional mediums. Charcoal drawings, swirly drawings of bicycles, and abstracted minimalist portraits are clearly scholar experiments, made whereas he was on the Rietveld Academy (the place he enrolled at age 17), exposing the younger artist’s makes an attempt to discover a voice and id. However they trace at later forays into concepts like land- or seascape, steadiness, and sustaining or dropping management. Moreover exhibited for the primary time is a painted seascape Ader made whereas working as a farmhand within the Netherlands in 1961. In it, sea and sky meld in fields of gray-blue colour that he’d depart behind when he moved to California in 1962.
After failing out of Rietveld, he earned an MFA from Claremont Graduate College in Los Angeles. Within the US, he shortly dove into pictures and movie, usually to doc his solo performances. Even in these early years the work was involved with existential points, together with failure and emotional vulnerability, in addition to longing, expressed in phrase items like “Please Don’t Leave Me,” that includes these handwritten phrases on the partitions of his storage studio. For “All My Clothes” (1970), the artist has unfold his clothes haphazardly on his small home’s shingled roof. Within the two small images titled “Study for Farewell to Faraway Friends” (1970), Ader seems each standing and sitting on a grassy knoll gazing over the ocean; the determine’s solitude maybe evokes the Romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer Above the Mist” (1819) or “Monk by the Sea” (1810).
New fabrication of “Piet Niet” primarily based on Ader’s sketches. (picture Kimberly Bradley/Hyperallergic)
Falling as deliberate failing later turns into a recurring theme. The 4 now-iconic silent “Fall” shorts run on outdated 16mm movie projectors in a single massive room at Hamburger Kunsthalle. In “Fall 1” (1970), Ader’s lanky physique rolls off his personal roof; in “Fall 2” (1970), he rides his bike right into a canal in Amsterdam; in “Broken fall (organic)” (1971) he hangs and swings from the department of a tree earlier than falling right into a stream. The motion is a mixture of slapstick and philosophical resignation. The 2 static projected photos that symbolize “Untitled (Swedish Fall)” (1971) present Ader standing in a Swedish forest in a single slide and on the bottom, as if a felled tree, within the different; students have recommended that this piece alludes to Ader’s childhood — in 1944, when he was two, his father was executed in a forest after it was found that he’d assisted Jews in escaping the Holocaust.
Bas Jan Ader in his boat Ocean Wave in Chatham, Massachusetts, July 9, 1975 (© The Property of Bas Jan Ader / Mary Sue Ader Andersen / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025. Courtesy Meliksetian | Briggs, Dallas)
With its simple choreography and detailed however unsentimental wall texts, the exhibition avoids overtly romanticizing the artist’s work and finish, however the mythology surrounding him can’t assist however permeate the sequence of works. What would possibly Ader have been considering earlier than embarking on his closing journey? For all of the philosophical underpinnings behind his apply (the “Fall” items riff on a line from Wittgenstein relating to gravity, and Ader took a replica of Hegel’s dense Phenomenology of the Spirit on his journey), did he fail to grasp the chance of what he was making an attempt? He had sailed the Atlantic earlier than, as a deck hand, in an 11-month journey in 1963. As artist Tacita Dean asks in an essay from 2006, did he really feel protected as a result of what he was doing was artwork? In his stressed seek for transcendence, was he setting himself up for all too acquainted failure, or inserting himself within the larger arms of destiny? Was there a second, as in his “Fall” movies, through which he selected to lose management, and be overcome by the forces round him? Within the 2007 documentary Right here Is At all times Someplace Else, directed by fellow Dutch California transplant Rene Daalder, Ader’s widow claims that the artist “didn’t expect to not make it.” He’d additionally stated he would sometime prefer to disappear for 3 years, after which return. She waited three years earlier than accepting that he wasn’t coming again.
Many conceptual artists of Ader’s period died younger: Gordon Matta-Clark and Robert Smithson additionally handed of their 30s. However as a character, Ader was essentially the most reclusive, inside, melancholy, and metaphysical — maybe merely essentially the most Northern European. His small however highly effective physique of labor centered on enjoying with and finally succumbing to the forces round him slightly than etching utopian visions on city constructions or pure landscapes. A lot of what Ader explored and produced was about surrendering to and even accelerating a sure future, however on the similar time about heeding sturdy inside calls — to journey, the liberty of open horizons, and the elegant. Numerous later artists have taken his work’s and life’s existential themes as inspiration. His longings could (or could not) have remained unattained, however right here, they aren’t forgotten.
Bas Jan Ader, “Broken fall (organic)” (Amsterdam, 1971), black and white 16mm movie, silent transferred to digital media, 1:44 min. (© The Property of Bas Jan Ader / Mary Sue Ader Andersen / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024. Courtesy Meliksetian | Briggs, Dallas)
Bas Jan Ader, “Thoughts unsaid. Then forgotten” (1973/2023) (picture Kimberly Bradley/Hyperallergic)
Mary Sue Ader Andersen and Bas Jan Ader in entrance of the Kabinett für aktuelle Kunst, Bremerhaven, 1972 (© Jürgen Wesseler / Kabinett für aktuelle Kunst, Bremerhaven)
Bas Jan Ader, “Untitled (The elements)” (1971/2003), C-Print, version of three (© The Property of Bas Jan Ader / Mary Sue Ader Andersen / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024. Courtesy Meliksetian | Briggs, Dallas)
Bas Jan Ader’s handwritten directions for “Thoughts unsaid. Then forgotten” (picture Kimberly Bradley/Hyperallergic)
Bas Jan Ader, “Untitled (Swedish Fall)” (1971) (picture Kimberly Bradley/Hyperallergic)
Bas Jan Ader: I’m Looking… continues at Hamburger Kunsthalle (Glockengießerwall 5, Hamburg, Germany) by means of August 24. The exhibition was curated by Brigitte Kölle with curatorial trainee Julia Kersting.
