Best Discount - Ronald De Bloeme

The Pharos Centre for Contemporary Art is pleased to present Ronald De Bloeme’s exhibition Best Discount. Following de Bloeme’s recent success at the VOLTA Show in New York, the paintings of this young Berlin-based Dutch painter, have been described by the New York Times as ‘eye-catching, talismanic abstraction.’

The core of the exhibition is formed from de Bloeme’s new large-format enamel on canvas works. These colourful works speak of the influence that consumer goods and the advertising world have on art. Christoph Tannert - art critic and curator - has stated that de Bloeme’s works reflect and reduce the constant presence of packaging, national symbols, video games and pictograms and their everyday penetration of our gaze. 'As an artistic inheritor of Dadaism, de Bloeme brings collage into the Internet age as he collapses the four dimensional media universe into these two dimensional canvasses’ (www.berlin.unlike.net). De Bloeme has called himself, not without pride, a ‘visual pirate’.

Composition is said to be the will to communicate – does this summarize the work of Ronald de Bloeme? Precisely: this will is central to his reflections and investigations about the nature of visual communication systems. The desire to reach others expresses itself with varying intensity - aggressive, tenderly, quietly, loud, self-interested, unselfishly. ‘Communication is the highest capitalistic virtue.’ (Hamish Morrison Galerie, Berlin, June 2007)

Solo exhibitions during 2008 have included the Hamish Morrison Galerie, Berlin; VOLTA Show, New York; the Berlinische Galerie, Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Berlin; and the Stedilijk Museum Schiedam, The Netherlands. Ronald de Bloeme has also shown in various group exhibitions in the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden and France. His paintings are included in numerous collections throughout the world including the Rabobank, GASAG, Galerie Neue Meister in Dresden, Espacio 1414 in San Juan, CBK in Rotterdam and Berlinische Galerie in Berlin.

Winner of the Vattenfall Art Award Energy 2007, Ronald de Bloeme studied Fine Arts at the Willem de Kooning Akademie in Rotterdam. He has been living and working in Berlin since 2000, when he was awarded a scholarship at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien.