Marlies Hoevers | Featured Artist
August 24, 2021
About the Artist
Marlies Hoevers was born in the Netherlands and got her bachelor of design at the Royal Academy of Art in 2006. She started her career as a certified interior architect with Merkx+Girod Architects, a leading architecture studio in The Netherlands, based in Amsterdam. It was during that time Marlies developed a strong fascination for materials, their appearance and their emotional effects on people.
After moving to Santa Cruz California in late 2009, Marlies started her own art studio 'HoeversID' and started experimenting with materials such as concrete, cement, textile, sawdust, cardboard and more that came her way. She became fascinated by the surprising process of bringing out the hidden beauty in ordinary materials. The perfect concrete in her work is not as smooth as possible, but a combination of smooth, cracked, spotted, scratched and different textures. By adding delicate materials such as wire or sawdust, the concrete gets a more fragile or softer appearance. The first series of concrete works are baptized 'Emotion Stones' (2011). Later followed; 'Memory Stills' (2011), 'Art Fossils' (2012) 'Cement Stitching' (2013) and 'Ink & Concrete (2013-2015).
This search for emotion in materials becomes leading in the years that follow. How do you capture your emotions in an abstract work of art? How do form and material work together on your emotion? Also vague black 'spots' (ink) that go up in the concrete are like your breath in life. 'Breath', 2013. The soul of the material is transformed into Marlies' emotion.
Over the Years
In late 2013, a collaboration with architect Mark Primack was established to process experimental concrete structures for an architectural project; The Delaware Addition in Santa Cruz. A large project for creative businesses with living and working studios. This led to a very exciting and experimental process in which enormous concrete walls were poured onto materials such as yellow sand, profiles, plastic and foils, just like her artworks but on a large scale.
In 2014 Marlies and her family moved back to the Netherlands. The 'material palette' also has no limits and is expanded in the years that follow to large textile collages in the series 'Unclouded' (2014 - 2015) and an installation of raw cotton for the Municipality of The Hague. (2016)
In 2020 Marlies started the series '2020', collages of silk, canvas and paper (mixed media) for the series “People and Thoughts”. Choices in life, moving far away, having children, the life of a mother and wife and life in the corona pandemic can be found in the expression of her art.
Notable Features and Exhibitions
Over the years her work has been exhibited at the MAH museum Santa Cruz, SC Art League and various galleries in California. Her work was featured in the 2011, 2012 and 2013 Exhibit & Auction for the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art and at the 2011 Art Party in San José. Her work was included in 'the American Art Collector' in 2014, 2016 and 2017. She is represented by Exhibit by Aberson, Tulsa Oklahoma, USA. In the Netherlands her work was exhibited during the annual 'Kunstronde Vecht en Plassen' weekends in 2015-2017 and she co-organized the EVAB exhibition `Kunst en Makers' in 2015, Vreeland. Early 2019 Marlies will start 'DeKunstInJou' to promote the creation of art. During these art lessons for children and adults the process of experimenting with an open end is central. In the summer of 2020, Marlies is organizing an exhibition with children's art at the Montessori school Loenersloot.
Artist Statement
"Central to my work is the continuous process of experimenting with properties of materials and bringing out the unexpected characteristics which are often hidden in the material. In addition, I strongly believe in the liberating power of art: With modernism as a driving force, it feels as if my mind is liberated when a series is completed: as if an answer has been given to my question or quest.
As a former interior architect I have always been attracted to materials and how they can be integrated in works of art to express emotions of myself as the artist, and also to elicit emotions by the observer.
My concrete works, as they have evolved over the last 14 years, can be best described as 2-dimensional sculptures; Assemblages of concrete and various materials come together to convey emotions or bigger stories. Concrete can be lighter then you think, and certainly more beautiful then you might expect." - Marlies Hoevers
