A mysterious creative force
In 2013, visual artist and musician Peter Zegveld (The Hague, 1951) took stock of his creative life in the artists’ book Exploded View. Thirteen authors put pen to paper to capture his multifaceted oeuvre in words. The result was a publication that serves as a marker in time: a record of an endless stream of inspiration. It brought together works created up to that point, performance programmes for theatre, television and site-specific projects, as well as works presented in galleries and museums.
For those who were not there: from the 1980s onwards, multidisciplinary artist Peter Zegveld appeared on virtually every stage imaginable, from the Aorta squatter stronghold to De Parade, the travelling theatre festival. He performed with Hauser Orkater and brought the house down as a solo performer at the Shaffy Theater. He toured Europe with the Batsheva Dance Company. He created monumental artworks in public spaces and exhibited in museums including Fodor, Rijksmuseum Twenthe and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. His talent and sheer joy in creating poured into auditory and visual works, flowing through the worlds of art and media in a continuous stream of performances and interventions.
The authors of Exploded View described this phenomenal blend of total theatre and visual ingenuity as “the beauty of the almost impossible”, “dynamic minimalism”, “drumming in the polder”, “drawing with light, sound and movement”, “conducting the work” and — yet another phrase — “joyful subversion”. This verbal attempt to encompass the essence of Peter Zegveld says everything about his immense yet elusive creative force: the embodiment of an anarchic and free-spirited view of humanity, unafraid of the grand gesture.
Thirteen years after Exploded View, Museum Beelden aan Zee showcases another side of Zegveld. An artist who plays with sensory experience and intuition. Prose transforms into poetry. No drive-through container theatre in the middle of the A6 — one of his successes — or action painting fired onto a wall using explosives — one of his most notorious works. This time, the focus is on the smaller, yet no less intense, observation.
Thumbnail / header image: Peter Zegveld, Massa. Kinetics, projection and sound, 2019.
Portrait Peter Zegveld, Stef Verstraaten