George Korsmit / Homage to the soul

For the exhibition Homage to the Soul, George Korsmit made eight murals in the staircase of SCHUNCK Glaspaleis. Coincidence and chance play an important role in his works. The colours and shapes that make up the paintings are dicey and blindly chosen by someone other than the artist.

Korsmit works the outcomes into images that always remain in relation to the person who helped determine the work. This outcome is always unpredictable and free of figuration. A 'ritualised coincidence', as Korsmit himself calls it. Increasingly, he works together with others and limits his own role to that of intermediary and executor. He then determines only the steps and rules by which a work is created. The contact with the other person and the location where the work is created always influence the execution.

In the staircase of SCHUNCK, Korsmit brings together existing and new works. In Homage to the Soul, murals can be seen that were previously made on location in places such as Amsterdam, Seoul, New York, Peekskill and Jixiang, and which are now coming together for the first time. New is the work Homage to the Soul (Dom Hans van der Laan, 2019). For this, Korsmit stayed at St. Benedictusberg Abbey to determine the grid and colours on location in a quiet room at the monastery.

This timelapse is the making-of of the mural on the second floor of the staircase: Nobody's Out There. 2007-2019. 608 × 312 cm. Acrylic. 223 colours were chosen blindly by assistants from a stock of 1114 Pantone colours. Dimensions of the grid were determined by the artist using dice. A first version of Nobody's Out There was executed in W139 in Amsterdam in 2008.