Courtyard Installation FRAC of Lorraine
© Photo Krijn De Koning
Luminous, glowing spaces of color are Krijn de Koning’s specialty. As a sculptor, he constructs rooms—or better said, rooms within a room—that utterly change the experience of a given interior or exterior environment. His most recent transformation: the exhibition space of Platform 21 in Amsterdam, formerly a modernist church. A circular space lit from above becomes a gentle maze of transcendent white and blue. From his pared-down site-specific installations in chapels, exhibition spaces, parks and other public spaces, one might think that the Dutchman Krijn de Koning trained as an architect, but de Koning is an artist who began his work simply by drawing. The structures he now builds are deceptively simple, and his sculptural installations are temporary, despite his dedication to the clear lines and elementary quadratic forms of a builder.
Still, his commitment to the power of looking, the obsession of the draftsman, has never waned. Often his clear reds, yellows and blues are mapped out by the artist onto underlying wooden constructions on-site, like sketching on a one-to-one architectural model. Other works function almost as optical illusions by extending floors or walls through barriers separating indoor and outdoor spaces. As in the dramatic example of a courtyard installation in the FRAC of Lorraine (2001), the cut-out “doors” and “windows” of his three-dimensional compositions function like viewfinders, while his planes of color serve as gateways to a more intuitive dimension. However, for de Koning color is never symbolic. Physical reality itself is “an enormous wonder”, and color is simply “a very communicative starting point”. Perhaps it is this attitude that helped the celebrated international artist win a major building commission in the burgeoning urban development project of Amsterdam Zuid, where he has been asked to put his sense of color to use in bringing the drab structures of an electrical works to life. A technical enclosure already stands. Much more is planned on this site and others as an increasing number of institutions and urban planners are recognizing the immediate, enthusiastic public response to de Koning’s special brand of color immersion.
