14.06-27.09.2026
MATERIAL WORLDS

This year Lustwarande celebrates its twentyfifth anniversary with the exhibition MATERIAL WORLDS, which shows a selection of the state of the art in international sculpture. MATERIAL WORLDS is the fitteenth edition of Lustwarande.

Contemporary art reflects the current social debate, from identity, which includes a strong focus on ethnicity and gender, post-colonialism and migration, intersectionality and xenophobia, new visions on the relationship between organic and inorganic entities, advancing robotization and big data, climate change to the worldwide increase in political violence and war.

In addition, contemporary art has another important focus. The attention to material is extremely striking, not only in sculpture and installation but also in painting and drawing and in textile artworks. This focus on materials, the skin of the artwork, has been in the foreground for over ten years now after a long period of relative absence. Craftsmanship is back in art and the physical effort of the maker is something to be proud of. While entire bridges roll out of the 3D printer and digital artworks ensure immaculate presentations, natural materials and traditional techniques are also being used again.
It is remarkable that materials such as wool, felt, silk, rubber, clay, glass, natural stone and wood currently play a major role in contemporary visual arts, architecture and design. What used to have a dusty image is now seen as an innovative force. These materials are combined with traditional techniques, local craftsmanship and ancestral practices; indigenous values are increasingly being cherished again. Artists are interested in material processes. With or without the help of new (computer-controlled) techniques, this valuations combined with examination and reuse of the materials, with sustainability as the guiding principle.

Where does this renewed interest in materiality come from? An explanation can be found from a philosophical-sociological perspective, more specifically from the deconstructivist ideas of thinkers such as Bruno Latour and Timothy Morton and that of (eco)feminist thinkers such as Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, Octavia Butler and Stacy Alaimo, radically breaking with the frameworks of the Enlightenment and Modernism, which explain the world from the perspective of man: at the top of the ladder of everything on earth.

The current era is called the Anthropocene by many, or the 'age of man'. It concerns the idea that the current geological era is determined by the irreversible human influence on the planet. Human actions have such an impact on the earth that all organisms, including humans themselves, experience the consequences. This concerns above all the realization that humans are warming the earth to such an extent through CO2 emissions that it mayl eventually become uninhabitable. Some thinkers deliberately avoid using the term Anthropocene, because it refers to humans and therefore does not adequately express that all entities on the planet, organic and inorganic, are on the same level.

While concern about the state of the earth has always existed among many peoples and communities, but did not reach the West, it is here also not something of the last decade. As early as 1968, the CLub of Rome, consisting of scientists and industrialists, expressed its concern about the future of the world. But it was not until 2015, with the Paris Agreement, that agreements were made to tackle the climate crisis and its consequences.

It is not surprising that such current frameworks have an impact on contemporary art production. The relentless emphasis on the importance of matter has led new generations of artists to raise the question of how matter influences people and vice versa. In the field of sculpture and installation, this has led to countless representations in an ever-increasing number of materials. Here, combinations of plastics with liquids and chemicals (the theme of the exhibition EARTHEATERS in 2023) and classical materials such as glass, textiles, metals, clay and wood, the oldest sculptural material (the theme of the exhibition ARBOS in 2024), are at the extremes of the spectrum. Artists such as Isabelle Andriessen, Jes Fan, Agata Ingarden, Mire Lee, Pakui Hardware and WangShui, to name but a few, are representatives of this new hybrid, fluid sculpture at the one extreme.

Alma Allen, Carol Bove, Gabriel Chaille, Simone Leigh and Claudia Comte, among many others, represent the renewed use of classical materials used in solid sculpture, at the other extreme. Between these two we see a colourful parade of mixed forms, in which materials are carefully combined, processed and assembled.

Material, as Auguste Rodin discovered hundred and fifty years ago, is the fundamental determinant of form.

The title MATERIAL WORLDS refers to this physical and engaged sculpture practice. The participating artists are not only interested in admiration for the material, which is the case when artists draw on conventions of abstraction and formalism. Many of the artists fascinated by materials are in wonder and concern for the earth. Their art examines the reconsideration of the disturbed relationship of many people, certainly in the Western and individualistic world, with the planet. And their art is used - whether or not combined with science and technology - to turn the tide. It is about a desire to preserve Mother Earth and to honor her.